Art Blogazine: August 2019

Thursday, 29 August 2019

'PRIYA Dube’s poetry and art speaks of her life' - Satarupa Bhattacharya

Art & Deal Magzine

New Delhi

Priya Dube (1992) was born to a family belonging to Uttar Pradesh in Sumesherpur. The family shifted to Bombay, where she was raised. Her journey in the field of the arts began at an early age when she began to sketch and draw her immediate surroundings. After she acquired a degree in interior designing, she worked as a designer for five years. Eventually, she found her calling as a fine art practitioner and began her practice from home.

Dube’s poetry and art speaks of her life: a life that she chose to rebel against the institutionalised setups with. Her works speak of her resistance to the inculcated practices of boundaries that has over the years become our identity. In a society of norms that includes language, marital status, class consciousness, and occupational constructs, the very act of making art and writing poetry has become a form of resistance.

Her art speaks a language of the inculcated systems of womanhood, whereby, womanhood is her boundary. This is the boundary she breaks with her installation of clothes lined up against the windowpane, which she calls “Your Thoughts Drying Under the Sun, Night will be Sunshine with Hair”. The installation speaks of how we hang our minds out to dry, while we mull over our situations on an everyday basis.

The clothes lined up are a regular middle-class household sight, where lining them up is the easiest and fastest way to find them and arrange them. Her installation shows the convenience associated with her daily life, where she finds herself constantly rummaging through her surroundings for details that accentuate her being. Similarly, the self-portrait is an insight to how she looks at herself. A poem that describes her yearning to be one with what she looks at while looking deep within herself is included as the title and a part of the painting. Her words enunciate her desire and longing that she has buried within herself. This journey is not only spiritual but also political, where she discloses her utmost desire to be seen as a capable being and a desirable one at that. The genitals are so regularly decisive of what or who we should become and how prolifically homogenized is that idea that she creates several images of the vagina to dismount from the stationed notions of gender.Here, she includes a poem that describes the mood of the vagina. Thereby, she brings forth the point of consent and the dilemma of gendered desire. Her other works to speak of her daily interactions with her surroundings and with the core of her existence.

“Love Box with Smoking Ideas”, a depiction of several images from her everydays, and “Beautiful Mind”,a combination of several aestheticized pictures of people, are evocative of everything that has visually pleasured and plagued her. Such a range emphasizes her keen ability to look deep within and outside the peripheries of the society she struggles with as a woman and as a metropolitan individual.

All in all, Dube’s works are evocative of our every day, whereby, making it even more plausible for us to see what we don’t want to see. Her works enables us to see which we have seen every day and have functionally desensitised ourselves towards. Her anguish, her love,her desire, and her ability to mull over all that she is or is to become has all been set right in front of our eyes to witness. In doing so, we are not only witnessing her journey but the journey of our collective existence.Therefore, Dube’s works speaks of us all.

Satarupa Bhattacharya

Nippon Gallery

30/32, 2nd Floor, Deval Chambers,
Nanabhai Lane, Flora Fountain, Fort, Mumbai - 400 001/ Tel: 022 66333997
Mumbai, Maharashtra

Friday, 16 August 2019

ART & SOUL : Text Part III: Subaltern Sexuality-Body as Text

‘In literary theory, a text is any object that can be “read”, whether this object is a work of literature, a street sign, an arrangement of buildings on a city block or styles of clothing. It is a coherent set of signs that transmits some kind of informative message […]’ explains Wikipedia.

Recent work by Sudharak Olwe

In contemporary Indian art we continue to evolve the genre of the human figure or portraiture as representations of our culture and its unspoken dimensions. The photographic portraitures may represent new dimensions of ( trans) sexuality, gender, queer groups or focus the unspoken through the subaltern. My focus is the gaze of the protagonist in the picture should meet the onlooker.

Every human being experiences a discreet sexuality which is silently there, often in all human actions and expressions. Often these experiences are repressed, except gentle suggestions in human conversations. Sexuality is deeply silenced or means “layers of silencing” in common human experiences. Spaces and right to conversation about one’s sexuality/ sexual identity are few and nil especially for the subalterns (economically, culturally and socially dispossessed). Consequently, “speech as expressions of sexuality” and ruthless violence are deeply entwined.

Sexuality forms an important aspect of human identity. The discourse on sexuality breaks on the experiences of the “materiality” of the human body. There is no other consequence that shapes one’s sexuality than the materiality of the human body. How is one to negotiate these transforming inwardly human experiences during childhood-puberty onwards? What is the nature of subaltern sexuality? How does it manifest itself as a poignant reflection of the self for most humans? In “Subaltern Sexuality: Body as Text” one may be able to read the deeply unspoken, through-in the bodies of the protagonists. The incredible voices from within- its manifestation as a poetic content of the world or home (within) plays with inevitable control through punishments and silenced power abuses.

Sudharak Olwe at Art & Soul Mumbai ( image source sudharak owle fb image)

Sexuality is a bundle of energy when politicized- gets recognized in the “queer moment/s” that any given social/cultural space creates, making aware of one’s emerging/ transforming sexual identity. Several such moments become really poignant for oneself to observe also the rupture from within. A tearing inner voice acquires within as the gaze returned (looking at the camera lens). Often the bare gaze of the protagonist is layered and poetic with these expressions. The visuals are subtle and strong manifesting the unspoken in their meeting of gaze with the onlooker.