Review by Deepika Sorabjee
In Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour the male protagonist accuses the female protagonist of not being ‘endowed’ with memory -- even as she recounts precisely the events in Hiroshima that fateful day, from seeing it unfold across the world via newsreels in Paris. Like Resnais, curators Swapanaa Tamhane and Susanne Titz, present a montage that is witness to a time, an era, an ideology. Loth as the curators are to labels, it is a female lens that asserts memory. Split between the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastru Sangrahalaya and Gallery MMB, the show ferments time past and keeps the present fertile in agency - expression is rife; gendered and engendered. ‘In Order To Join: The Political in a Historical Moment’ sees participation of a certain age of women artists-- those born in the decade post the end of World War II, which is also the decade of a recently independent India.
Capturing a period in the 80s and 90s, the works here draw one back to the then emergent in the contemporary, and the processes in art practice. Text as image, video, performance, installation, were experimentations then - how do we see it all now, thirty years on?
Rummana Hussain witnessed the changing levels in tolerance that were the supporting pillar of India’s tenuous post independence secularism. In the late 90s, post the destruction of the Babri Masjid (a mosque in Ayodhya allegedly built over a temple), riots sparked and then incinerated secular ideals as minority groups were targeted. The Muslim minority was fragile and tense; against this backdrop, Hussain’s art practice became increasingly conceptual and personal. To stand in the room that installs her last work ‘A Space for Healing’ (1999) is to live her mind’s last moments as she died young from cancer - the stretchers on the floor are receptacles for intra venous tubing; gilded, they could be mistaken for canisters/grenades. All around the four walls painted a bleeding red, seemingly spelling out something in Urdu, are everyday tools fashioned into script. As the street noise of Bombay plays out, her time is re-lived, a politically portentous time is foretold. In another work, ‘In Between’ (1998) she walks the streets of New York City announcing herself in ghungroos (bells on her ankles) - look at me, who am I?
This all too laden-with-lament contrasts with the work of Helen Chadwick, another artist who died young, which is vastly different in temperament. There’s insouciance in very strong feminist playouts as in an early video work, ‘Bargain Basement Bonanza’ (1976). Women in bulbous, unshapely, padded, plasticky outfits, prance around in bright red lipstick doing mundane chores even as a soundtrack plays silly advertisements off a radio. This irreverence that hallmarked Chadwick’s works throughout her career, reverberates in another work at the museum. Small casts of vegetables encased in fur rings in ‘I Thee Wed’ (1993) stand as much as phallic symbols as they do for a finger ringed. Whatever the intention, it is rather cleverly installed in a vitrine around the rotunda atrium along with cast bhuta masks which have a phallic presence themselves.
Angela Grauerholz’s ten inkjet prints, ‘Privation’ (2001), have a remarkable presence. Comprising scans of her books that partly perished in a burning, the titles reflect the artist’s interest in politics and typography. Here they seem to rise phoenix like in their holographic lift off the background, foregrounding the loss of a lifetime’s collection. It seems appropriate to place the work in a museum surrounded by objects of the past, historically significant and once collected too. Downstairs, Ana Mendieta’s haunting videos use the body silhouette in organic abstractions - there’s beauty in the stark filming, an earthy awareness of material and process. This use of body was rife in the 80s as performance took hold in artists’ practices as seen in Mona Hatoum’s work in the four videos at Gallery MMB -- her exilic practice and strong feministic questioning of the politics of the her homeland makes the viewer participatory to the history portrayed . Palestine, patriarchy, performance, are still current agencies.
Jamelie Hassan uses video as memory as her work in exile - ‘The Oblivion Seekers’ (1985/2009). Family footage from Lebanon and footage from the first Islamic Conference held in Ontario in the 50s play on a split screen and in another work, her neon Arabic character (pronounced noon)(2009) is prescient of the politics of our time. A chapter heading in the Quran, it is a provocative work - both formally, a glowing blue against matte black. Placed as it is at the entrance, it has the immediacy of the current practice of Islamic State (IS) militants marking fleeing Christian’s houses in Northern Iraq with this Arabic character. That it has become symbolic in Facebook campaigns seems potent both in it’s geographical marking in Northern Iraq and in and its Facebook marking as used in protests by displaced Christians in exile.
Around the rotunda at the museum Pushpamala N.’s and Claire Arni’s Ethnographic Series (2006) blend perfectly with museum artefacts in a vitrine, as do Pushpamala N.’s ‘Archives’ (2008), comprising 29 sand casted baikhathas or account books. But it is her irreverent ‘Hygiene/Swachch’ (2015) that keeps the political tempo of this exhibition ticking. A goddess like torso, dressed in finery, uses two deft hands (from the multiple arms she sports) to unpack a skull. Parietal, temporal, frontal lobes of the brain are duly pulled out, systematically cleaned and scrubbed and then repacked with alacrity. The ‘tadaa’ like swish of hands on completion of the two minute task mocks the current political campaign of the Hindu right wing majority’s so called ‘clean-up’ of Indian ‘culture’ that pushes majoritaniarism ruthlessly, disregarding the secular that is indigenous to the history and art of this nation.
The curation is relentless in building this subversiveness in the practice of women artists across continents. Several art works are confined to the less exhausting, more ‘feminine’ techniques of art making (typography, printmaking).Hailing from Pakistan, Lebanon, Germany, Iran, they are innovative in approach - Lala Rukh (Urdu text as image in poster making for the Women’s Action group in Pakistan), Mona Hatoum (in her confrontational ‘Over My Dead Body’ (2005) poster of her strong feminine profile up against a toy soldier), Astrid Klein (using Brigitte Bardot and blanking out text during Baader Meinhof times, memory and oblivion), Chohreh Feyzdjou (a print takeaway of her personal archive of made objects redolent with memories of Persian bazaars).
Further, Rosemarie Trockel’s ‘Spiral Betty’ (2010), wittily takes on Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’ - the terrain she deals with is intra-uterine, a minimal loop contraceptive is seductive in its Dan Flavin tubelight construct.
Sheela Gowda’s camouflage sculpture ‘Branches’ (2014), seemingly defiant, wrapped with army surplus fabric at nodal points, its peeling fragility seems to belie an inner strength. Her use of found material reworked is seen again in a staged dialectic of modernity and the organic meeting halfway in an install started appropriately in Germany and finished in India. Adrian Piper draws on the social: ‘Funk Lessons’(1983) raises cultural consciousness through dance - colour and culture confront as a predominantly white American audience learns to move to an Afro-American beat.
It is Shelagh Keeley’s quiet photo and video essay, ‘Barcelona Pavilion’ (1986) and ‘Las Vegas Notebook’ (1986), that brings some quiet to this sibilantly strident show. Images of Mies van der Rohe taken in 1986 (way before it sparked other photographers to be inspired) show the lush materials at play in Rohe’s masterful pavilion whose emptiness of things contrasts well with the gloss and lights in ‘Las Vegas Notebook.’ Keeley’s eye draws us to what’s there -- material, typography, light, space, already ripe with meaning.
The voices of dissent both in politics and practice are honed successfully in amplification as each artist provokes thought beyond the object presented. The presenting of multiple works by many of the artists shows diversity in their practice, as different media came strongly to the fore in the 80s and 90s: ‘In Order to Join’ is participatory in both practice and agency. Perhaps there are one too many works that makes a single viewing weighty and confusing. There is no temporal linearity or rhythm to the installation, one travels back and forth - what is constant is the very strong politic implicit in the work.
This transnational survey, while lively and engaging as a mix of practices with a common thread of situational comment, is a mixed bag . The overtly feminist works seem a tad tired in a retrospective viewing and one wonders at the need for a re-examination. From taking a stand in the 80s and 90s from the outside today’s digital age places artists within conflict and gender issues that is now not just a minority issue but very much an immediate common concern, which gives ‘In Order To Join’ an anachronistic feel in the exclusivity of female comment on issues such as gender, exile, conflict and stereotype. Still, the thoroughness in the selection scores in showing rigour in practice that engages deeply in not just thought but technique over decades in art making.