Review

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Of Blood, Blues and Life

Amrita Gupta Singh examines the trajectories explored by Anindita Dutta in her solo show, ‘The Exit,’ hosted at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai.

“Culture, at least in its patriarchal form, thus effectively prohibits any return to red blood, including that of the sexual arena…” (Commodities amongst Themselves | Luce Irigaray)

The trajectories of Anindita Dutta’s exhibition ‘The Exit’ which was hosted by Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai are multi-layered. You enter the gallery space which is no longer a neutral white, but an intimate red that investigates ‘a return to red blood’ and the materiality of women’s bodies (menstruation, fertility, penetrations, birthing, pain, exits and violated hearths). One is tempted to read her works via the essentialist lens of feminist theory that states that gender is a natural difference between men and women that is psychological, biological and also linguistic. But when one delves deeper into her works, such a reading would be limiting because the artist also raises questions about the cultural constructs of gender, sexual politics and power that is keyed in the continuous and familiar discourses of everyday life and the experiential reality of the artist. One could say that a kind of feminist paradigm is evoked where the artist examines the socialisation of the female body, its struggles and limitations while explicating that sex-gender systems are not abstractions of the human mind but the results of a historical human activity that underscores patriarchal structures.

The central motif that the artist uses in her dualistic sculptures and watercolour drawings is the female pelvic bone which supports the womb and herein a range of associations with the politics of the body and its identity in relation to society is set off. Anindita has a superb grasp over the materials that she uses and her ideological parameters have been shaped by her formative training in Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan and later refined in universities of the West (Purdue University, University of Iowa and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture). The pedagogical method of Santiniketan remains important in the use of natural clay, rope and craft methods of stitching (a female act) as political tools of her practice. Anindita works with sculptural installations, photography, performance and video, relating the body to matter and nature, earth and elemental femininity. She deals with both the presence and absence of the body, life, decay and death, a body struggling to be set free from patriarchal burdens in both historical and real time. In her own words, her work “is empathetic to women forced to hide behind oppressive social contexts prevalent throughout cultures, ranging from gender, social expectation, religion, language, political views, country of birth and caste.”

As an artist who has an exposure to both eastern and western cultures and an urban sensibility, Anindita is keenly aware of the politics of her own field. In her earlier works, her constant usage of the motif of the bed, the phallocentric metaphors of foot-pillows, the passivity of the stitched female figure, drawings citing violence critiqued male fantasies and the psychological pain of calculative negotiations that are resultant of sexual politics and power. Her present works cut out through flesh and tissue to reveal the skeletal armature and vaginal exit; menstruation is presented as twin monumental plaques where formless blood is transformed to red rope-like palpability exiting the body with stains that refer to photographs of a female face twisted in pain. This work is not a simple representation of the monthly cycle of a woman but is more complex in its reading of the issues of blood and the social aspects of menstruation. This natural cycle has political, ritualistic and cultural implications where patriarchal modes of thinking have imposed views that prevent women to create their own meanings of bodily events and are forced to observe the ‘etiquette of silence.’ They are unable to have positive feelings about an undeniable aspect of being a woman, an example could be how women are not allowed to enter sacred spaces during their periods in India or that menstrual blood is often viewed as ‘dirty,’ evoking feelings of revulsion in both men and women. In this work, the female pelvis and blood is presented larger than life, making the viewer tangibly aware that menstruation is but a natural difference between the sexes and how gender shapes the way we act and create our binary realities. It is a powerful conceptual/aesthetic representation that displays the artist’s skills at its best.

The pelvis is again laid out on the floor in replication and the sexual union is represented with a knot at regular intervals where a phallic form penetrates the vaginal cavity. The armature is made of fibre-glass with white canvas being stretched over the piece and stitched together. The artist transforms the gallery into a kind of reliquary where questions of sex and death, archeological remains and cultural constructions are played out. One wonders whether these were really sculptures, the tactile quality of the surface and the malleability gives one an insight into the feminine sensibility that propels the conception and production of these works. Both the hard bone and soft flesh admix while the white stitched canvas doubles up like skin stretched over the bone with the stitches alluding to scars/marks of pain on the body. The sexual knots create tautness in the composition, it is almost banal in its quality but a sense of discomfort pertains, is this knot consensual or forced? Is it love or rape? Is it tender or violent? Is it submission, is it betrayal, is it pain or comfort? A silent dialogue that is ambiguous in its connotations is evoked in this piece, and undermines how we participate individually and collectively in the production, reproduction, and legitimation of power relations.

Another work opposite to the above piece is twin representations of a silent scream; a face with an open mouth is attached to a gullet or spine like structure which is inverted to evoke a vertiginous social reality. This is framed by a series of photographs of a married couple (perhaps from the artist’s own personal/family history) with the man standing and the woman seated and the silent scream depicts the claustrophobia of age-old institutions and power equations; but this is one of the conceptually weaker pieces in this exhibition and is rather simplistic in its representation and reading.

A video performance, ‘A Matter of Moment’ in three projections depicts the artist covered in wet clay, performing momentary everyday acts. She drinks a glass of water, urinates on a western toilet and goes to sleep. Her gaze does not meet the viewer but is self-absorbed in these daily acts. The entire room and its objects is layered with wet clay and it is interesting to trace why Anindita has chosen clay as the performative medium; This approach is derived from the idea of ‘connectedness,’ of how the most mundane could be connected to a wide range of semantics, objects, social realms and ideas. Being born in a rural locale and then trained in the semi-rural space of Santiniketan, the ideas of clay, earth, woman, domestic acts, fertility, nature and environment fuse to become a medium that has culture specific implications. Anindita creates basic clay chambers, steeping herself in its organic and sensorial materiality, recalling notions of birth and home as she herself is distanced from in the urbanity of New York. Formally taut, the brownness of clay emphasises ecological concerns and a return to earth where the constraints of industrialism and scientific progress make survivalism and its interpretative repertoires highly debatable.

The last piece, an installation and video projection titled ‘The Exit 16,’ brings us close to a destroyed room with a focus on a dead fire-place. Various objects of the home (broken dolls, lampshades, torn clothes, fridge racks and other debris) allude to a kind of violence that the discarded space has witnessed in the past. Is this an illusion to a violated hearth, an accumulation of painful psychological debris that the viewer can only wonder about as we gaze like a voyeur into a private struggle that has been made public ? This piece has an almost nihilistic connotation where the ruins and termination of human feelings, willing, suffering and action, of all that we consider precious is transformed into nothing and is absurd, to borrow from Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘the pathos of in vain.’

A highly nuanced show, the viewer ‘exits’ out of the red reliquary with existential questions: our relationships, our loves, our fears, our values that we hold dear are almost fictitious constructs, this is the ability of art to cue one to new modes of self reasoning that makes existence itself valid where blood, blues and life matter.

(Amrita Gupta Singh is an art historian and writer with an interest in arts management. At present, she is the Program Director at the Mohile Parikh Center (NCPA), Mumbai. Email: amritagupta.singh@gmail.com )