Tearing The Heart Out

Navjot Altaf -  A Life In Art, curated by Nancy Adjania, NGMA, Mumbai

 

 It was in 1997, while working on a textile revival project in Bastar, that I first heard of Navjot Altaf. While driving from Raipur to Jagdalpur, when we halted at Kondagaon,  I learnt of the project she had recently started there. I was intrigued because the villages of Bastar were unlike any other in India. The poverty and worldly innocence I had witnessed proved a tremendous test of conscience in resepct of the assignment I’d been hired for, and I wondered about her experiences.  Reading about her art and seeing some videos and sculptures at galleries in Delhi and on visits to Mumbai, had not been enough to get to the nub of her contribution or challenges.  So,  when I heard that Nancy Adjania had curated a retrospective of her oeuvre, slated for viewing in December 2018, I co-ordinated my travel plans to Kutch, returning via Mumbai, to ensure that I didn’t miss seeing this exhibition :‘The Earth’s Heart, Torn Out.’

 

 

Displayed  within  the semi-circular, multi-level galleries at the historical Sir Cowasji Jehangir Public Hall – a late-colonial, Science Society building subsequently converted into the National Gallery of Modern Art, were paintings, drawing, prints, posters, sculptures and videos rife with an emphatic express. Of a radical artist, who as a young schoolgirl, “while running wild in the pine-covered valley of Dalhousie…..felt the first stirrings to be an artist”. And her art, spoke evocatively of an innocent soul’s, almost violent response to a perceived violation of that sense of freedom. Where, as curator Adjania pointed out “She will fight every sullen bureaucrat, hostile censor and pursue every clue until she has a kaleidoscopic view of the situation at hand.”

 

Emergency, Silk Screen Print, 1977, 20 x 15 inches

 

Her artistic yearning to break free, from the binds of authority, gender, caste, tradition and even the physical confines of the body, was seemingly heightened by the spiral stairway - its coils contributing to the excoriated angst, rising towards an imagined goal of liberation. Beginning with images from pre-college years, intermingling with experiments in the socio-economic dialectic of Marxism, weaving through the politics and ideals of feminism, meandering towards the life, livelihood and art making of the Adivasis of Bastar; culled from an art-practice spanning half a century, was a rather overwhelming exposition of over two hundred art-works. Snaking their way up five levels of the gallery, culminating with the iconic dome-ceiling projection of a sublime video.

 

A ‘transcultural’ artist, travelling between Bombay and Bastar, while also collaborating or interacting with artists and researchers across Europe, the US and Latin America. Navjot Altaf’s trajectory could well be termed a quest, centred not on the pursuits of the unseen, abstract notions of self - beyond the physicality of form. But, more like a mission to understand the political dynamics of an unequal social milieu and locating herself, through this exploration.  Defining the tonality of her own voice - speaking from within spaces that were not as privileged; facilitating their discourse vide her own indignation.

 

Video Still of ' Soul Breath Wind'

 

The title for the exhibition is cited as a tribute to voices suppressed by apathetic authorities, presented in the film ‘Soul Breath Wind’. Of assertions of the people of Chattisgarh denouncing unregulated mining of their land in connivance with the State. And where, Nirupama, a farmer from Chattisgarh, in warning of the disastrous outcome of displacing them from ancestral lands and of disemboweling the earth, says: “Purein dharti ka kaleja nikaal diya”. And,‘ The Earth’s Heart, Torn Out’ also becomes symbolic of Navjot’s creative outpouring.

 

Ancient Water Sign, Nalpar, Bastar

 

At the base of the dominant, spiralling, chrome stairwell leading from the ground up into the impressive vaulted ceiling, spanning the fulness of its generous curve and not unlike graffiti, was an odd sort of marking. The blue symbol painted on freshly white-washed, cemented walls turned out to be an ancient water sign. It was part of the Nalpar project in Bastar, which had matured from studying the parallel but different modes of art making, (her own and the Adivasi’s) into creating innovative public sites where women, children, and men of all ages come for the mundane job of drawing water for domestic or other usage. In studying the significance of signs, symbols and objects incorporated by the communities during rituals and social functions, their integration and continuance, over centuries of living and in their spiritual life, this symbol became one of the structures designed in collaboration with the Adivasi artists. Transforming hitherto uncomfortable and unhealthy modes of collecting water into an aesthetic activity. An unusual art project where the participant was also a viewer as well as, a possible, future user of the site.

 

How Perfect Can Perfection Be, 2015-2018, Water colour drawing on Wasli paper and PVC transfer on acrylic, 22.5 x 32 inches each

There was no specific chronological order to the display. Adjania placed Altaf’s photographic series ‘Abdul Rehman Street’, shot during her student days in the early 1970s, alongside recent, millennial water-colours, on the ground level.  Emphasizing the non-linear progression of the artist’s creative development, she collated various other phases, on subsequent ones. With her portrayal as a young woman through Marxism and JJ school of Art on the third floor and effects of ‘violence on sociality’ on the second. Structuring the show such that each phase is self-consistent within its space/level and the curatorial mise-en-scene allows for conversations across the various levels in the spiral-shaped NGMA building. 

 Factory Series, 1982 - Ink of Board Paper, 24 x 30 inches

 

Here, in dramatic, high contrast black and white tones of ink onboard paper, of the ‘Factory’ series, made during the turbulence of Bombay’s labour movement and disruptive textile strike of 1982, Navjot compelled us bear witness to image-fragments that, bereft of human presence, and by implication humane ideologies, implode upon themselves. Exemplifying the militant approach of Dutta Samant - the movement’s trade union leader, which successful to a point, ended in disastrous defeat: of jobless workers and factories converted into real estate assets by factory owners.

On level four, in revealing ‘transgressions’, Adjania tells us that “Navjot was deeply troubled by the gaping lacuna in regard to gender inequality in Marxist discourse”. A question that opened up “both ideological and iconographic problems” compelling her “redefine the representation of the woman’s body… imprinted by the insidious forces of patriarchal socialisation.” Drawing inspiration from female surrealist painters Carrington and Kahlo who refused to “play the muse to male artists……foregrounding their own desires and subjectivities” Altaf appears in a self-portrait, with large spiral coils emerging from her vagina. In another painting, from the early 1990s, colouring the background of the canvas in a powerful shade of red and representing the female body through tactile, pebbled textures, was an endeavour to legitimize the act of masturbation. Navjot thus, drew attention to the pleasuring female self – rarely depicted in contemporary Indian painting.

Being an artist myself,  makes the act of viewing an informed and engaging process. But, seeing effort of this diversity, intensity and scale, one somehow overlooked the details of every canvas or watercolour brushwork and video, going beyond specifics of each, searching for the artist. Where did Navjot Altaf stand in the midst of these marks - the ridges, rents and commentary zig-zagging the complexities of contemporary society which had provoked her art. And what was the crux of her cry?

 

 

I read her commentary as a pursuit for relevance. To find meaning and purpose and also one of frustration in the inadequacy of art alone, to do this. Which almost contradicted the free-spirited run in the woodlands, awakening the artist in her.  On level 3, Through the ‘Proyom’ posters, in “Dreaming of the Revolution” art is designed for modes of public communication, but in that tonality of stark contrasts – of marks weighted with rigidness of steel/ mortar/glass and urban an imprint, it was impossible to trace even a glimpse of the free soul that once roamed the pine covered valley.

 

 Surfaces,  1970, Recreated in 2018. Ink on Gateway
Tracing paper, set of 12,  11 x 15 inches each

 Surfaces,  1970, Recreated in 2018. Ink on Gateway
Tracing paper, set of 12,  11 x 15 inches each

 

As I walked from image to image of strident lines and compositions, listened to the cacophony of videos competing to be heard; the responsive outcome of this audio-visual impress, which crowded and stifled my senses, was empathetic. I too wanted to see her free.

 

 Surfaces,  1970, Recreated in 2018. Ink on Gateway
Tracing paper, set of 12,  11 x 15 inches each

 

Thoughtful, I sat on one of the benches trying to clarify my insights, but multiple videos playing simultaneously with full volume, jarred. The sound of crashing oceanic waves, a woman wailing or something akin to howling and then something else superimposed on these audios, was disconcerting. But uncannily, it also evoked the artist’s many voices. A constant, conflicting inner dialogue externalised through art, overlaid on the walls at all the levels I had ambled through. An attitude that struggled and fought but intended to find a way. A fundamental vision that had the passion, the will, the courage to express its confusion and it's floundering  anxiety. And  the lacunae – not just in the attempt to listen to the testimonies of those affected in the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002, but a generally pervading inadequacy. In the willingness to really listen and the foreboding of not being heard.

 

Lacuna in Testimony, video still of 3 channel video with 60 mirror pieces

 

Reminding again and again of the churning and constant thrust of unequal forces in the social fabric that intimidated and magnetized the artist to seek a larger purpose, beyond the personal. Defying the intellect and its formalized learning, as she  witnessed the fallibility of existing knowledge in tackling the inequalities pervading the socio-economics of contemporary living.

 



Dev Nathan and Vasanthi Raman, core group members of Proyom and Navjot’s friends from 1970’s, interviewed in Anand Patwardhan’s documentary, Prisoners of Conscience in 1978



 

The 1990s proved a turning point, as art installations paved ways for artistic collaborations that not only altered conventional art-viewer relationships, but provided the potential for collaborative democratisation. And the earlier threads of Marxism, feminism and activism, inspired by debates on demarcations between westernized forms of art and rural craft, coalesced. Where, from 1997 onwards, Navjot began an active collaboration with Adivasi artists sharing in their lives and improvising a two-way learning and art-making process. Cultural-theorist Nancy Adjania, who has followed Altaf’s work closely, informed that the transition from Bombay to Bastar was not easy. “She and her artist colleagues found themselves working hard to overcome the barriers of class, gender, location, language, education and world-view.” And, that it took two decades of engagement with Bastar, to evolve new forms of artistic dialogue through collaborative and cooperative projects such as Nalpar, at the micro-political level of village and district.

 

The retrospective exhibition as a whole had a profound but disturbing effect. It made me revisit my own anxieties with regard to a self-absorbed, isolated art practice. There were no pretty pictures to comfort, nor transcendence to  reassure. It was all about community and the trauma of belonging and unbelonging. A veritable abduction of the self. Yet, when she brought back hope, it was harking back to Marxism. In the capacity to live together, among each other as equals.




They Clean our Compound, 1977, Silk-screen print 21 x 14

 

Wading through the dark messages, doomed social inequity and cries of careless living tearing out the heart of the earth, exhausted by the gloom, I heaved myself up to the last level.  What else could there be to learn about this devastating world, where all her struggles had not achieved enough to let the light shine through – for tranquillity of soul to prevail in the accomplishment of its goals.

 

Links Destroyed and Rediscovered’ (1994)  Site specific installation

 

Reaching the last step, I was confronted with an unwieldly plethora of dark, black, plastic  pipes spilling out like the ghastly excess of sewage in our polluted cities. Contrasted with this, on the opposite side of the stepped passage was a reprieve in the minimalist, meditative grid-mesh of  ‘Between Memory and History’. Where Navjot had created a secular shrine, replacing the traditional vermillion thread prayer-knots of a dargah, with white paper ribbons inscribed with questions and words “from testimonial literature” that the viewer was invited to open.  I did, to find the telling words of “abduction” and some illegibly over-typed text, signifying a lack of clarity, so essential in finding the answer to one’s prayer.

 

‘Between Memory and History’, Site specific Installation

 

From Partition, female infanticide, to factory strikes, unregulated mining, riots and pogroms, to collaborative practices with Adivasi craftsman, the irrepressible artist-activist in Navjot Altaf had involved herself in myriad ways with a chaotic and seemingly unfair world. She had an opinion on many matters and hadn’t averred from expressing volubly.  An artistic journey riddled with the scars of a traumatic path, was an equally dark and distressing passage, for me as the viewer.  She presented  social conundrums, gender issues and artistic concerns, but the overwhelming question that I came home with, was of myself as a creative individual in such a dysfunctional and disparate society. In Fin-de-Siècle (end of 19th century) Europe, when socio-political structures had begun to disillusion, the artist, writer, composer and poet’s inner navigation had provided direction. Today, vide Altaf, this thinking was being re-aligned.  Where the artist could not take her subtle role and subliminal significance for granted, but must strive, against all the odds of an indifferent social ethos, to carve a  relevance, however tenuous.

 

‘Between Memory and History’, detail

‘Between Memory and History’, detail

 

Ingeniously projected, on the concave interior of the dome, was a video of insects and spiders working in perfect tandem. “Inspired by Gregory Bateson’s ideas about patterns which connect both the realms of the human mind and nature, and his belief that if we break those patterns we destroy both the ecology and human lives, Navjot set up a kaleidoscope that promises the possibility of inter-species communication”

 

 

Digitally fashioned this Kaleidoscope reproduced snowflake-like patterns, albeit in the colours of the natural world and not the innocence of snowy white.  Taking me back to the scientific notations of Masaru Emoto and his treatise on the ‘Hidden Messages in Water’. Of his experiments that showed that the greater perfection in symmetry, visible in the snowflake crystal formation, it reflected a higher level of purity in the water source that had been frozen.  Forming 70% of the human physiognomy, water is impacted by words and sound – the music we play and the things we say to each other. The grace and gratitude or hate and anger we express towards the semi-aqueous body of self and others, impacts through this innate feature.  In close proximity of the ‘Shrine’, the symmetrically repeating, Kaleidoscopic patterns of the natural world,  appeared as Navjot’s sublime evocation of a prayer - her life-time’s quest for lived harmony. A wish, a hope that hadn’t dimmed despite the odds - of tearing her heart out. The undying courage of a determined, optimistic soul, creatively devising her out of the wilderness.

 

 

Ecce Homo - Behold the Man!

Ecce Homo - Behold the Man!
A retrospective exhibition of Satish Gujral
At the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

Ecce Homo exclaimed Pontius Pilate the Roman governor of Judaea, just before presenting Jesus Christ to the high priests, after the flagellation and the crowing with thorns (New Testament). Santo Dutta, curator of the retrospective exhibition of Satish Gujral at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; likens the torture and death of Jesus with the dark shadow fused in much of Gujral’s work, essentially referring to the Image of Man in the art of Satish Gujral. Thus the exhibition is entitled with Pilate’s cry: Ecce Homo – Behold the Man!

When I went to interview the artist, I went with a million questions and some reservations too. There were many incongruities I could not reconcile with. It was in meeting the man, rather than the artist, that I found some answers. He touched my soul with his poignant thoughts and charming eloquence despite his hearing impairment and hesitant speech. I encountered a very special human being. His art only exemplifies this, but to understand its diversity and contradictions, it is not art history that one turns to but one’s humanity.

The word “genius” was used by Charles Fabri in 1952 for Gujral’s “deep-felt humanity” in his portrayal of suffering and sorrow in the famous Partition series of paintings. The story of Partition, Gujral concedes was evocative of his own anguish and that if Partition had not happened; if he had not been witness to those atrocities, he would have invented another theme to depict this. From his studio in Lahore, he could see the movement of the first waves of refugees, and as the impetus for Partition grew, it became his responsibility to physically transport refuges, abandoned women and children to camps set up in border areas.

The horror and violence of what he witnessed were perhaps some of his worst experiences and in portraying this he also exorcised some of the disbelief and horror of losing his own hearing at the age of eight, in an accident while on holiday in Kashmir. The stark reality of this enforced silence, he says, was “terrible” and subsequently shaped his whole being. Painting, for him became a means by which he tried to substantiate his existence, for as he says: “what proof you have when you cannot hear the sounds around you that you really exist?”

A retrospective allows us to see the way an artist has evolved. When viewing the work of Satish Gujral the journey unfolds in leaps and bounds. A young and emotional Gujral is evinced in the brutal, anguished strokes that define the harrowing portraits of Partition. The colourfully passionate collages are evocative of his Mexican sojourn and its re-defining influence. While the political portraits speak of his proximity to power; other drawings are infused with light-hearted folksy patternings which speak of his search for an identity rooted in this ethos. The majestic phase of working with wood, which gave us some of his finest work, is well represented and there are also works in metal and stone; some brilliant individualistic expression in architecture (photographs) and then more canvasses where some light-heartedness emerges at the end of a very long, dark tunnel. The progression is not slow and neither is there a definitive pattern of evolution.

 Each phase is complete in itself; not an adjunct to some other media or phase of his working. This can be disconcerting if you look at it from a narrow, orthodox perspective, but seeing it from this artist’s viewpoint of being inside a train in transition, where the constant changes allowed him to ‘break’ the otherwise stifling silence; one realizes that we take so much for granted and that in our stereotyped expectations of artists and their creative endeavour, we tend to lose track of the human being. How, when, where and why do we separate the artist from the man?

 “Artists are not men of ideas, they are men of feeling”, says Satish

Gujral. Their responses to the world are governed by feelings of joy, of inadequacy, of pain and more and this is what they express as they paint or sculpt. When Gujral saw wood turn to cinder, he determined that he wanted to work in wood. He didn’t have any idea what he would do but he knew that he wanted to work with burnt wood; with the same passion that Van Gogh had expressed to his brother Theodore, which as Gujral recollects he wrote : “I want to paint red. I want to paint red. I want to paint red; with all of my heart I want to paint red,” pointing out that he does not say what he wants to paint with/in the colour red. This is the kind of impetus Satish Gujral felt with every change of medium he undertook: a heartfelt passion.

The burnt wood phase was a consummate one that excluded any painting whatsoever and lasted some 10-15 years. Large-scaled works, some of them 60” x 40”, have endured the artist’s passion and responded with a lyrical movement, belying the rigid nature of wood, evocative of a handling of material with deceptive ease. This is the genius in Gujral that has been able to make any medium respond to his being; expressing through it his passion, his pain and anguish. Wood and gold leaf dominate in these works, with a minimal use of leather thongs, glass and ceramic beads. It is the scale; the starkness in the absence of detailing; subtle but emphatic utilization of texture, along with the contradictory use of burnt cinder with gold leaf that draw the viewer into the sensual folds of their wooded but not wooden embrace.

Satish Gujral is a man full of stories and anecdotes. For each question, he has a story to tell. In each of his works the stories are there to be read but perhaps few have the privilege to meet the artist and understand some of what underlies the ideas he has shared through his creative work. However, this becomes a valuable insight in any attempt to understand and evaluate the work. If it falls short of our expectations, is it because we do not know enough?  Does the onus of making it explicable to us, lie with the artist?

In our world today where time is at a premium and everyone in a hurry to get somewhere, it is not possible to grasp the depth of an artist such as Gujral is. The haunting hollows and bulbous forms seem intimidating in their traumatic rendition, but it is in these works that one also finds the essence of the man who has the courage to face himself and his pain. His preoccupation with this made Fabri, the art critic who incidentally also ‘discovered’ the artist in him, comment that “Life is like a round pillar with both the dark and the light sides of it” but that Satish Gujral “seemed to be obsessed with darkness only”. The artist penned his reply to the Editor of the Statesman (1956) saying: “Life is no doubt like a round pillar with both the dark and the light sides, but no individual can see both sides at the same time. If ever I come around to the light side, I will depict it.”

Many shades were passed through. One definitive phase in Gujral’s work and evolution as an artist was the time he spent on a scholarship in Mexico (1952-54). His association with the muralists Riveria and Siqueiros opened up a whole new world of ideas and materials. There also lay a parallel in the political and economic restructuring of the early 50’s in Mexico, with the same in India after years of Imperial rule. Gujral found greater empathy with the Mexican artists’ search to assert a cultural identity, rather than the ideology of the Progressive Artists’ Group he had encountered during his years at J.J School of Art in Bombay; for their quest focussed on the inner rather than the outer being. It has been this that has defined his search, where he may have touched upon ideas that emanate from the Indian miniature tradition and folk art but always returning to ideas rooted in himself rather than his ‘Indian’ identity .

Gujral’s work, stretching over five decades, is defined by a marked individualistic adisciplinarity. Every change of material and form, however passionate the approach, also evoked some difficulty of reception. His eclectic training at Mayo school, Lahore; where he was exposed to carpentry, clay moulding, wood carving, drawing and design and his training with the muralists in Mexico did however, facilitate the process. His architectural work is approached with “complete lack of historical inhibitions” and without following any dictated ‘ism’ of the time. He has worked on numerous building projects which include the Belgian Embassy in New Delhi, for which he was honoured with the “Order of the Crown” by the Belgian Government. The sculpted quality of this building, composed of brick dome vaults and skylights, created a whole new architectural vocabulary. Of this Gujral has said: “I just designed it through some kind of instinct and when I had finished I still did not know what I had done.”

In Satish Gujral, it is the spirit that triumphs and this is his greatest success. Whether it is grappling with a deafening silence, painting on canvas, working in wood, stone, metal or designing buildings, it is the spirit behind it all that shines through. A spirit of survival: an inspiration to emulate.

 And yes, he did begin to see the lighter side of life. The canvasses done at the turn of the century testify to this. Taking their cue from his early works, the forms remain sculptural, the lines are more sensual and colours turn vibrant. Reconciling with the nature of life, the colour of emotion has changed and so has the texture. The figure has evolved with a distinctive character, its anguish predictably blunted by success and the maturing intellect; reflected in the texture that forms the base for all the canvasses which absorbs rather than highlights strokes of the paint brush. However, one does not find in them quite the passion hitherto characteristic of the work of Gujral. The eye seeks this reassuring evidence of the ultimate triumph of the spirit, which celebrates in reconciliation, without trace of lament for the struggles or for what has not been achieved. In the latest canvasses on view: the Game series, one is particularly aware of a return towards a lament. As the hues darken once again, they seem to say:

“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught .....”