In the maze of colours and textures, figures and structures, at Art Houz gallery’s ‘Madras Jasmine’ exhibition of paintings, sculptures and installations by 23 Chennai-based women artists, there’s one message that breathes through: that it’s impossible to paint with one brush the rich body of women’s visual art language. Curated by Premalatha Seshadri, and organised in collaboration with the Association of British Scholars’ Chennai Chapter, the show contextualises itself in a history of Indian art that has rarely celebrated the contributions of women. As artist and academic Razia Tony writes in the introduction, the exhibition aims to gently right this wrong, at the juncture of Chennai’s 375th birthday, by projecting on a common platform the work of the city’s women.
And their voices couldn’t be more varied. There are artists who dwell deep on the feminine existence itself. G. Latha’s women, for instance, come in pairs of friends, or as mother and child and stare blankly at you from the canvas, their bodies sparse in colour and their surroundings bare, rendered in the simplicity of pastels and charcoal. For artists Manisha Raju and Gita though, their women stem from those in Indian mythology. As goddesses in their glorious splendour for Gita, and as meditative women with their eyes closed, radiating light and inner quiet, in Manisha’s work. Niloufer Siddharth’s women take on metaphorical tones in ‘Broken 1 and 2’, their physical frames doused in tears large and small. The feminine is also rendered through the symbolic as in Samia Khan’s ‘Atreyi’ that uses the idea of rivers as the “nurturing bridge” between life here and life after.
Womanhood is also explored in relationships with the opposite sex, children, family and society at large. Rajny Krishnan looks at the woman as “the earthy mother” in her fibreglass sculpture that cuts away a half of the woman’s body revealing a cavity that represents the “inner search”. Thejomayen Menon examines the ties between man and woman in her ‘Transmundane’ series that picture a faceless couple in embrace enmeshed on a canvas that’s cut and carved, pierced and dented. Words in Malayalam and English, leaves, flowers and veins poise the couple against this fractured backdrop. In Kirusiya Rani’s 36 x 48”-sized arresting black-and-white canvas, the male and female forms merge into an amorphous form titled ‘Jackfruit’.
A host of these artistes break away from the feminine sphere and address the world through un-gendered eyes. One of the most innovative installations at the show, for example, is Victoria Niveditha’s dining table set for six, replete with glasses and cutlery, with each plate depicting one of the six sins — ego, greed, lust, envy, wrath, and sloth. To one side of each plate sits a glass of pills and the other a heart, representing the choice between mind and heart, reason and impulse.
Disembodied organs feature in C.P. Krishnapriya’s installations too, titled ‘Puzzle’ with prints of eyes on jumbled wooden cubes, and ‘Sugar can cure anything’ with sticking out tongues pierced with pointed nails. V. Anamika takes thise further in ‘Unprovoked’, a series of nine rectangular pieces that are collages of photographs, newsprint and text, each seemingly simple image minutely lined and detailed to reveal an inner complexity.
In the spirit of celebrating Madras, Parvathi Nayar’s ‘The Road of Madras’ takes a vast canvas and layers it with a map of the city, postcards, an aerial views and a broken line from Bharathiyar’s poem Nirpathuve Nadapathuve — ‘Peacock dancing I to thee’. In her second piece ‘Inhabited Design’ Parvathi plays with the idea of scale and miniaturises the eagles’ eye vision of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, thus remarkably shifting how one perceives these cities. In one sense, what Parvathi does for the idea of the city, is what this exhibition does for ‘womens’ art’, by breaking its notion as a monolith into one that defies definition.
