Splashes of feminist fervour

From 1987-89, a group of four women artists came together to create a travelling exhibition, Through the Looking Glass, to provide themselves a platform in what was largely a male-dominated space in India. Considered among the more important exhibitions of that decade, Looking Glass featured Nalini Malani, Madhvi Parekh, Arpita Singh and Nilima Sheikh. In what seems a coincidence, a retrospective on Madhvi Parekh’s five-decade long career has just opened in New Delhi (disclaimer: Parekh’s show has been curated by this columnist), while another on Malani will open in France next month and in Italy in 2018. 

Malani came from an upper middle class milieu who defied convention to marry below her social status and reside outside her comfort zone in Mumbai’s Lohar Chawl. But then, her formative years had been shaped by feminist perspectives and views by thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, all of whom she listened to while attending art school in Paris. In her work, she is known to take strands of history and mythology, told usually from a male perspective, and re-look at them from their women protagonists’ points of view: a reversal that challenges patriarchal notions without being obviously confrontational. Yet, the truth and its ugliness are there to see. 

“One day the streets all over the world will be empty; from every tomb I’ll learn all we imagine of light,” stencilled Nalini Malani on paper using water colours for a work that she exhibited in 2016, and which now recurs in polyptych as reverse painted panels ahead of a retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris next month. It forms part of a continuing series, where titles such as Connections: House Without Walls or Lohar Chawl offer as much insight into her life as her mind. Malani is at once rational and cerebral, not an easy artist to assimilate within the dialogues of Indian art, and you are left unsettled about how much of her rebellion is her point of view around which she builds her art, or for which she deliberately constructs a premise. 

Portrait of Christ-I, by Madhvi Parekh

Parekh’s work, on the other hand, stands outside of gender in the sense that she does not take a stand on the issue, though she is herself surprisingly modern in her thinking. Surprising because she appears conservative; it is her mind that is liberal and, simultaneously, feminist. Her practice includes everything from memories of her childhood in rural Gujarat to inspiration from her travels and she acknowledges learning the use of acrylic sheets for reverse painting from Malani at an art camp. 

Like Parekh, Nilima Sheikh’s work is a culmination of her travels, while Arpita Singh is shaped by a woman’s intimate, interior world. Sheikh transitioned from being an academic-style painter to being inspired by miniatures in India, but also by murals and traditional practices from regions as far apart as Afghanistan and China, whose mythology, along with that of Kashmir’s poet Agha Shahid, has lent an undercurrent of subaltern learning to her work. It is her response as a woman artist that is distinctive and holds the quality both of soulfulness and a lament. And it might well be the resolution that Singh’s world, where women are threatened within the safety of their homes by the hierarchies of society, finds.

Women artists no longer need a gender-specific platform for their work even as a certain misogyny refuses to fade away three decades after the exhibition. Art has a way of addressing these concerns within its own matrix, but while women artists have been known to work with a number of global, humanistic concerns, instances of male artists referencing female-centric or, specifically, feminist perspectives remain harder to find.
 

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated