Featuring the works of six women artists from Italy and South Asia, an art project titled “Visions in the Making” by Art Hub Asia is on display at the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre in Delhi. The project is curated by Myna Mukherjee and David Quadrio. “Andrea Baldi, the Director of the Italian Cultural Centre, asked me to work on this project and I told him that I would do it only if there was an Indian counterpart in dialogue with us and so that is when Myna came into the picture. We decided to work with the proposed artists from Italy and to paiFr them with Indian and South Asian artists. The idea was to try and find a way to make the works somehow resonate with one another and it’s really amazing that everything actually does come together in a strange and magical way,” reveals Quadrio.
All six artists Natascia Fenoglio, Stefania Galegati Shines, Marta Roberti, Amina Ahmed, Shilo Suleiman and Gopa Trivedi come together to create altermodern works that question the notions of standardisation and commercialisation, while simultaneously playing with the concept of time and space in a bid to accommodate new emerging modernity connecting different cultural groups together. “Some of the art works are actually realised here in India like the one by Stefania Galegati Shines, which is realised as a carpet, or the edible bread-hands by Natascia Fenoglio, essentially designed to connect various Indian dance mudras with certain iconic Italian gestures,” explains Quadrio.
Buying an island
Shines presents a project called “Let's buy the island of the females” which deals with the task of buying an island. “The whole work is about buying an actual island named ‘Isola delle Femmine’ which can be translated as ‘The Island of Women’ that is in Sicily in front of the coast. With some friends, we have decided to buy it. So, the island is to be purchased by women, for women. Now, here it is important to understand that across the world only 30% of the area is owned by women and it further drops to 13% in Asia. There is a watch tower on the island that was built in the 16th century. It was badly damaged during World War II. The portraits of the island that you see at the exhibition in form of big format carpets with writings of the noted existential feminist Simone de Beauvoir are all about promoting the idea of buying the island. The idea behind using carpets for making portraits of the island adds to the fact that ‘carpet area’ is also a denomination for measuring land in India,” explains Shines.
On the other hand, Amina Ahmed’s work borrows from folk and spiritual traditions, geometry and metaphors. Her work questions to what degree she can shape her own representations. Her work ‘Grief, Loss, Sorrow’ takes one through the universal act of falling on one’s knees as one bends to read the inscription on the wall using the magnifying glass. “The gesture represents the surrendering, the falling down, when you hear of a death, loss, or sorrow. You fall on your knees, your heart surrenders, and your limbs are no longer yours. The act of falling on one’s knees is also associated with submission and prayer,” explains Amina who couldn’t stop herself from joining the women at Shaheen Bagh. “I felt nothing but love from the women of Shaheen Bagh, a wonderful sense of solidarity and camaraderie,” reveals Amina whose other two works at the exhibition, ‘Transpositions I, II, III’ and ‘Time. Staircase of my Spine’, deal with the thresholds of time and space.
Contemporary artist Shilo Suleiman uses wood and sculpturally painted cut-outs to create layered composites. Her work “I Come from Beauty, I Return to Beauty” tells an old story from a distant land about a beautiful goddess. “There was once a beautiful goddess whose honeyed beauty was so thick that every god who saw her became attracted to her. Unable to control themselves and fearing that these scandals could destroy the ancient heavens, the gods conspired to do something about this. So, they poisoned her, and placed her body beneath the soil in a far and dark and hidden place. But her divinity was so fertile that from her body began to grow medicinal plants that would forever benefit human kind,” explains Suleiman who likes to see her own body as her first canvas.
In contrast, neo-miniaturist Gopa Trivedi uses diverse materials to grapple with the complex socio-political stances pervading South Asia. As part of the exhibition, she presents a suite of delicate aesthetic portraits of saffron flower through its various stages of bloom. “When I say the word ‘saffron’ in today’s context, what all comes to mind? My work is around the idea of saffron as a sought-after commodity as well as the pun that’s associated with it,” teases Trivedi. On the other hand, Marta Roberti presents us with her pictorial tracings that create the illusion of a walk through the forest.
Interestingly, the works of all the artists deal with nature in a particular kind of way. “One of the artists imagines that the yearning to be connected to a higher thing, which is central to Sufism, could actually be a metaphor for a desire to connect with the nature. And a lot of the artists take from nature, as women. Gender is another common theme. The idea was to work around the issues of gender but not necessarily talk about women’s rights as much as representation because right now the art world is really skewed as there are a lot more male artists out there. So this was a chance for us to really amplify what women want,” sums up Mukherjee.
(On till February 28, 2020, the Italian Culture Centre, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi)
