Reena Saini Kallat’s nuanced multiple-media exhibits of Anatomy Of Forking Paths derive from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Garden Of Forking Paths wherein the notion of many possibilities existing simultaneously is proffered, allowing us to taste both the delectable and the sordid fare, without having to make a choice. Reena ruminates, however, on the reality of choice and examines every juncture at which roads have forked, retracing and revisiting patiently.
Past the frosted glass doors at Art Houz, you enter to watch Synapse , a nine-and-a-half-minute film at an ophthalmologist’s clinic where respondents are being tested for visual acuity. The letters they hesitatingly read form words on screen as ‘sovereign’, ‘secular’ and ‘to all its citizens’. Our Constitution, the film indicates, engages us distantly as the Snellen chart. The notion of refusal is embodied in Color Curtains — two posts strung across with double strings of rubber stamps carrying names of people whose visas were denied. As many as 14 different languages and some 1,500 rubber stamps go into every installation in Synonym , a series of buoyant portraits, identifiable from afar. While evoking its traditional role in bureaucracy, every rubber stamp is unique, though obliterated in the larger landscape, like humanity, a jigsaw puzzle of similar shapes with different colours and names.
A larger-than-life hand holding a steel compass lingers over dates of wars for independence in Measurement Of Evaporating Oceans . Of the salt-sprinkled dates, Reena says, “Salt has many connotations, but the preservative quality came to fore. We carry the memory of the salt of sea in our bodies.” Her installation on the Wagah-Attari border — two gates, one Pakistani, the other Indian — deliberates on the significance of openings, closings and the divide between our countries. Red sacred threads binding the gates endear us to the need to unite. Treading socio-political discourse with consummate ease, Reena’s ability is in communicating the complex without rendering it overtly simple. Hers is an art that draws us to witness history in every reconstructed event in the framework she creates, with careful context to the larger circumference, examining the emergence of individuality against anonymity. Where ceremony, rules, regulations, laws all deem to perform a certain function — like a spider weaving a fine line, going to and fro, these works invite us to examine the arguments that they pose and the definitions of the outcome.
Memory and transformationBenitha Perciyal is a favourite at Art Chennai and without doubt this forthright young woman who does not decorate her words or work reaches out with a raw honesty. “Some may ask, ‘what are you doing in this mall, Benitha?’” she says. “But here I am and the space is everything; what we do in this space, who we speak to and how we relate.” When Sanjay Tulsiyan, Art Chennai convenor picked Bergamo, a luxury mall, for her show, he knew that it was against her grain of the natural and the traditional. Benitha was conscious of not wanting to invade the ambience of the mall. In the selection of pieces and her display, Benitha does not circumvent the situation, simply flowing into the space in the unexpected milieu. “In fact, some people coming here ask me, ‘where is your art?’ That is great!”
At the entrance, a figment of Benitha’s likeness sits, one foot set on a raised bulk, made of limestone, myrobalam, sand, jaggery, brick, copper and wood next to a title — In My Body And My Soul . The sacred, the vulnerable and the perfumed all come together. In front of the elevator is a Madonna, with hands imploringly raised, made of makko powder, coal, clove, cinnamon, lemongrass, cedar wood, gumguggul, myrrh and frankincense. Memory with clarity lifts us to a space of everlastingness. A pair of earrings, with Benitha’s pet squirrel Jerry embossed in excruciating detail, nestles in a small wooden chest in a nest of rope. Hands — restored from an effigy of Christ — hold a necklace of enamel and mica shell, emblems preserving the memory of Johny, a dog. In the slight stance of supplication, in the gesture of blessing, and in earthy and basic browns, there is an indelible sense of sacred. “Nature gives everything,” says Benitha. “She keeps on giving. It is we who draw boundaries and make separations. When my squirrel Jerry had disappeared, I chose to believe he was not dead, but still somewhere. Every event is a link in a chain, leading me to the next and the next. Each thing references the other.”
