It’s usually the artist who goes looking for her muse. But for veteran artist Meera Devidayal, the sea — the protagonist of her latest show, found its way to her in an unsuspecting moment. It was on a regular visit to her husband’s Maker Chambers office at Nariman Point, that Devidayal found herself gazing at the sea as reflected on glass windows of the snug maze of office buildings outside. Strangely, the sea itself in reality could not be seen from any angle whatsoever. This image, of the sea’s reflection, that had wound its way in, asserting its presence, became Devidayal’s trigger, one that she calls the “found image” — a fulcrum of sorts, around which she built her body of 28 artworks. Working with a combination of video, photographic installation, paintings on digital prints and pure paintings, Devidayal gathered material from different sources, her own as well as borrowed, from writers, photographers and poets, to give us Water Has Memory , currently ongoing at Chemould Prescott Road.
“It was quite a surreal sight”, Devidayal recalls, and strangely one that she confesses couldn’t be found again in the exact same way that it was witnessed that very first time. Perhaps it was “that particular time of day and light and tide”, that just did not re-transpire ever again. In the bargain, Devidayal ended up finding several other images to extend her story. In some ways with this show, the artist returns once more to her patent urban landscape with the city at its core. And yet, this is the first time that she’s ever focused so directly on the sea. Her earlier works that dealt with migrants, mills and labourers are not entirely left out either, but in Water Has Memory , there is a definite shift in Devidayal’s socio-economic milieu from the daily wage earner on the street to the white collar employee working away at his desk within closed, air-conditioned office spaces.
The centrepiece of the show is ‘Water Has Memory’ — a seven-and-a-half minute video displayed on simultaneous loop across three screens. Devidayal relates how putting this together was a technical nightmare. The way in which the screens are placed, though disturbing at first, manage to eventually draw you in. There are moments of pure sublimity when the sea, or its reflections; shimmer over the everyday banality of a Mumbai afternoon. With superimpositions, one feels overwhelmed as the sea gushes over everything from people waiting in queues or working in offices to high-rises and their ghost sketches. A fishing boat that glides in from one edge of screen one travels over and across to the reflection in screen two, reminding one of the sea’s vast expanse. One wishes that the sound accompanying the video was softer, one that would draw you in by calmness, rather than the threatening crashing sound of the waves that pull you back to the turbulence of reality, both man-made and natural.
In Devidayal’s work, there are several points of encounters between her different worlds of layered co-existing realities. She brings these onto her canvas with humour and irony. “In our lives here [in India] religion, life…everything is very intertwined…you don’t go specially to the church…there’ll be a brothel on the way, you go and do matha tekan somewhere else…” and on it goes, she chuckles. The hologram as a favoured material that the artist has chosen to work with time and again makes a re-appearance. She uses it both as tiny strips on construction rods that momentarily catch the sun or as a shiny dreamscape from which Italo Calvino’s words from his Invisible Cities seem to emerge. The hologram’s fleeting double vision quality is a metaphor for the ever changing cityscape. It also applies to the seascape that in Devidayal’s second video, ‘Mirage’, makes smooth transitions from seawater to slabs of ice. The room that this second video plays in is plastered on all three sides with images of buildings, with the sea on the screen as the only respite. This relief lasts only temporarily though, as in no time one sees man encroach on sea space, transforming it permanently into concrete. Devidayal brings in her philosophical reasoning here “…everything that goes up has to come down.”
Beyond the video work, the sea is treated as a means for exploration and as a passageway that provides people with the promise of a better life. Through her paintings, digital images and poetry, Devidayal recognises the fact that, “We have forgotten that the sea contains nectar and poison, both in equal measure…” However, these works supporting this extension of thought somehow feel too real and rooted in the now, a far cry from the transcendental plane that the videos leave you with. Images like ‘Trapped’, then seem almost superfluous. The video work, with some text and poetry that leave the rest to one’s imagination seem sufficient, like the right proportion of salt to stir up the senses just enough. One wants to linger here in this space of deep, reflective moving images that best encapsulate Devidayal’s ephemeral yet edgy style. As she puts it simply, “The right image is everything. That should be so potent, it should resonate in many directions for many people”. And that’s exactly what Devidayal’s videos do; one momentarily loses a sense of time and space in these shifting canvases, that cease to be Nariman Point or Mumbai, travelling instead far beyond both geographically and internally.
Water has Memory is ongoing at Chemould Prescott Road until May 12
