Rekha Rodwittiya's art is personal, political and always arresting

Rekha Rodwittiya engages with art at an aesthetic and intellectual level simultaneously, writes Kishore Singh

Jehangir Nicholson was the kind of collector one meets not very often — more’s the pity — for he began his journey not so much rationally as passionately. He collected well, if not always wisely, putting his money on stalwarts but also trusting his instinct on yet untested talents. One such acquisition is now on view at the eponymously named Jehangir Nicholson Gallery at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) and has been garnering a lot of curiosity since it opened last month.

In 1995, the United Nations had invited Rekha Rodwittiya to create an installation at its office in Geneva. The occasion was the celebration of the agency’s 50th year, and Rodwittiya’s Songs from the blood of the weary covered the interiors of a wooden porta cabin. Its women-centric theme of shared histories and experiences was nurturing and empathetic at one level, but also willfully disturbing at another. A sense of betrayal and defilement formed a necessary part of that dissertation, even though it is not immediately evident to the unwary visitor.

Today, that room has been reassembled for the first time since its acquisition by Nicholson. The saturated colours lull the visitor with its immersive floor-to-ceiling art. At first glance, there is something appealing about what appear to be the accoutrements of a woman’s world with its pots and pans, its cups and kettles, the chores undertaken amidst the chaos of a household with its tiffins and clocks. Yet, there is something unsettling about these everyday acts of domesticity. Why are there multiple eyes on the woman’s dress — are they gazing at the woman, or watching out for her? What is the woman sewing — a dress, or repairing the damage done to it? The scissors, the sickle, the knives — are they instruments of punishment, or of resistance? The carton with its cuckoo clock and furniture, its ladders — surely that is a woman rendered as mere possession, a chattel?

The woman is the central character in her paintings, but she is also peripheral

Rodwittiya is the art fraternity’s outlier-insider, warm to a fault but surgically incisive to a degree, a mood changeling whose chimeric practice comes from a deeply felt space for which she is both admired and criticised. Hers is a process of engaging with art at a level simultaneously aesthetic and intellectual, something that reflects her position as both a participant and an observer. Her instinct, both as a person and as an artist, is feminist; she believes that art that does not take a position has no relevance.

Rodwittiya’s work is not strictly autobiographical, though she does bring to it elements of herself as a woman, and as someone who listens to other women’s whispers, reads the news and is aware of the world. Away from the claustrophobia that Songs from the blood of the weary induces, 12 works from the same period on loan from Sakshi Gallery carry a sense of the artist’s birthing process. The woman is the central character in these paintings, but she is also peripheral, for without the raindrops and palm prints, the incidentals of thread spools and umbrellas, the lock and key, the figure would count for less. When she places her hands under her dress over her genitals, one can’t help but feel that it is less an act of masturbatory defiance as it is of feminine defence. The paintings, though, are more overt political than the installation.

Rodwittiya has been a doorkeeper for concerns such as these, keeping a censorious vigil over unravelling social events. “Issues related to gender politics have been the cornerstones to my articulation as a painter all these many years. My work bears the insistence to discourse about the territories of violence that snatch away innocence wilfully and where within this the spirit of the woman stands tall — in endurance and insightful awareness — to overcome,” she says in acknowledgement of the exhibition’s bearing. “Today, almost 20 years and more since these works have been painted, we face the shameful truth that India continues to allow a child like Asifa to remain unprotected from the criminalities of power — where the lives of women or female children are still considered dispensable. For me this exhibition has come at a time (unknowingly) to act as a reminder to us of where our alertness needs to be, and how important it is to confront issues of equal rights and female liberty.”

At the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, which was set up by the executors of Nicholson’s will, and which has entered into a 15-year collaboration with CSMVS to house the permanent collection as well as curate rotating shows from it, the Rodwittiya outing is a case in point of the collector’s vision. The exhibition may celebrate an incandescent point in Rodwittiya’s journey, but it is the central premise of its subject that makes its reprisal relevant.

The exhibition will be on at the Jehangir Nicholson Gallery in Mumbai’s CSMVS till July 31