An Alternative Contemporary, Sunaparanta Centre for the Arts, Goa

An Alternative Contemporary - a celebration of contemporary miniature art.  The exhibition Showcased the evolution of Indian miniature painting and its influence on contemporary artists. Curated by Waswo X. Waswo, telling us how various artists are preserving and re-imagining the art form through innovative narratives and experimentation with the form through video and other media. 

Waseem Ahmed 

I’ve always been fascinated by miniature paintings. I recall copying them from prints one could buy at Lalit Kala Academy in the 1970’s . I absolutely loved the detailed brushwork as also the stylistic rendering of perspective, trees, dress and people. In the early 1980’s I even embarked on a cross-stitch embroidery based on a well recognised miniature. I worked on it for a year, but never got around to finishing it. I still have the unfinished piece and marvel at the very idea of undertaking such fine embroidery. But, it’s the details that I do love, whatever the form or media.

Vinita Sharma 

Monique Romeiko and Vagaram Choudhary 

totally transformed the miniature format. It was wild, creative and technically a feat to have created an artwork where the painting is static but people within it moved about doing yogic postures and other activities. The people are dressed in contemporary dress, in total contrast to the painted style. It was perhaps the most innovative work in the show 

At the far end of Sunaparanta, below the main building, was a small but delightful Gallery tucked away round the back, which showcased the Company Style of Indian Miniature paintings, but with a difference. The paintings  were framed by mounts painted with monochromatic patterns in gold  on cream background, drawing from ancient textiles and spices - re-invoking the legendary spice Trade that was traded not in currency but with India’s famed textiles. They reminded me of the monochromatic colchas that Portuguese officials commissioned as gifts and for private trade. 

The room itself was sheer magic with chairs, sofas, windows, a chaise lounge, chandelier and floor standing candelabra, drawn to perfection in black charcoal on the walls of the gallery. The chair and table beside it, in particular were so realistic that I kept trying to put my glass of wine on it, to free my hands to take a picture. If anything detracted from that charming exposition, it was the gold painted patterns on the mounts that lacked the finesse of brush that painted the miniatures they framed. These works were a collaboration between eight artists. Tulsi Nimbarak, Ghanshyam (chotu), Pawan, Raju Sharma, Sridhar , Kailashchand, Siddharth Gosavi  and Dr. Seema Bhalla 

Alongside the video by Romeiko and Choudhary, was a video by  Eeman Masood literally re-inventing the miniature painting in a digital format. Rendered in true miniature style, the colours and medium transformed the traditional art form. It’s worth the minute watch, as Masood explores dreamlike qualities of a forest painted like a miniature, highlighting the spiritual aspects of miniature painting - where attention to detail and perfection of strokes in minute forms, evoked the very spirit of creation. 

Almost akin to the magnificent formation of many creatures we find in the natural habitat of Goa. These days it’s the blue, brown and red dragonflies that charm : how nature has crafted them so small, so intricate, so perfect. Recently, I spied a couple mating as they hovered over the pool as I swam - floating on the aquamarine waters, mesmerised by natures craftsmanship 

I missed the works from Waswo’s own studio, but he said that when curators include their work it reeks of self-promotion, so they decided not to participate in the main exhibition but painted the walls of the cafe, which is a covered courtyard. Here, he’s posing beside his painted image in the Angan. 

Piyush Sharma 

Vinita Sharma, Piyush Sharma, Olivia Fraser, Waseem Ahmed and Manisha Gera-Baswani among others are also part of the exhibition and it was an eye-opener to see the range of work that is being created. 

Olivia Fraser 

Mahaveer Swami paints the contemporary woman, her gaze ever-so seductive in a nivi-style draped saree. Something one hasn’t seen before in the traditional miniature format. 

Mahaveer Swami 

In Jignasha Ojha’s depiction of modern buildings, one finds a petite woman in a ghaghra down at the right hand corner of the works, tugging at the delicate strings “of all she owns in her home”. As it’s the woman who is attached to everything in the house that she’s made a home with. Taking them with her wherever she goes. Jignasha shared her own attachment to such things and was devastated yet also fascinated that contrary to her imagination there was a woman standing before her art, who had no sentimental value attached to anything in her home. That I had sold almost everything in my Gurgaon home before moving to Goa and hadn’t missed a thing. I remember looking at the emptied apartment and sensing how complete it looked empty as it did before, when it was a lived space, furnished with my stuff! 

Jignasha Ojha 

 Ekta Singha interprets of layers of experiences with design motifs and other elements derived from Mughal, Persian and Rajput miniature paintings, evolving a contemporary vocabulary for the form  on surfaces that are painted with metaphorical and personal references to miniature paintings.  

Ekta Singha 

The circular plaques with unevenly placed floral borders which are fading, broken and disfigured in parts, frame delicately painted forms like a broken fragments of a tea-cup, a woman with a long braid being pulled by unseen hands, a beetle-nut cracker and other such quirky images outlined in a dull tone of crimson, placed in a discreet curve of the plague, drawing one’s attention to their significance. 

Ekta Singha 

I was, of course, drawn into the broken cup, looking for the tea that was spilt, the stains it created, but it was bone dry. Without the memories of hundreds of pints of tea one has drunk through the mornings of living, without evoking the energy of stains. Just something so barren, so stoic in its brokenness. 

Ekta Singha 

Alexander Gorlizki’s work seemed to reference some elements that we’ve seen in Waswo’s own work, particularly the inclusion of western elements like a Beetle Volkswagen trailing a horse, a man dressed in jodhpurs blowing a bugle, an astronaut pushing a pram and a rotund gentleman replete with top hat and breeches riding a massive seagull. However, Waswo informed me that Gorlizki had been here long before Waswo, as his mother was a buyer from the US, so he frequented India a lot, was familiar with her culture and ideas such that aged eighteen he created a sculpture with Mahatma Gandhi’s trademark round spectacles. Which “was quite precocious” 

Alexander Gorlizki 

Alexander Gorlizki 

All in all, a really refreshing experience. If you haven’t been to see it yet. Do go see the show 

Unfinished embroidery (cross-stitch) based on miniature painting. (NOT IN EXHIBITION) 

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.

 

 

A Curious Inheritance - Gautam Kansara [Review]



Don't Hurry, Don't Worry [multi-frame]

Kansara seems obsessed with his family. He records and re-records conversations around the dining table; his grand-parents sleeping and moaning and reminiscing, projecting videos previously recorded, onto wall spaces and then re-recording them. The juxtaposed frames are disturbing and evoke a sense of ghostliness. In ‘Don’t Hurry, Don’t Worry’, the woman with the rolling pin appears to be semi-transparent where cupboards and chopping boards seem to pass through her. She is also disjointed through vertical lines formed by the juxtaposed frames; again creating a sense that she is not really there. But her voice is clear and unlike the visuals, the audio is not blurred. The woman rambles; the sentences seem to make no real sense and yet when you connect this, through other videos, the “Jhansi ki Rani” who fought the British is brought into context with the fact that her own father fought the British too.

Gautam Kansara thus suggests that memories are hazy and manipulated to suit the one reminiscing. In this case it is the artist himself re-constructing a past. With few spoken or physical insertions his identity is sketched through the memories he presents. Kansara guides the lens of technology into personal spaces, investigating the nature of the Indian family and its generational experiences impacted by migration. His persistent preoccupation with the same group of people and their story which is repeated with a kind of senility is as curious as it is revealing. He edits tightly, but the conversations appear un-edited as he takes us into his grandparents’ flat in London where people meet and engage, watched by the video camera, sometimes aware and sometimes it seems not.

Rangpur, video still

In Health, Wealth, Name and Fame [Rangpur] Gautam takes us through his journey to the remote village of Rangpur in India, where his grandfather was born. He traces his antecedents to a humble farm and tells us his grandfather made good by virtue of an education. The soundtrack is an amalgam of conversations recorded over 6 years, digitally pieced together, where his grandfather is dreaming of going back, recounting details of his childhood. In Health, Wealth, Name and Fame [Maheshwari Udyaan 1&2,] he unravels history that is buried in the past with his grandmother’s recollection of her father and his role in the Quit India movement and that he has two parks named after him. The fact that they left the very land that his maternal great-grandfather fought for, to migrate to U.K. - the land of the colonizer that was ostensibly being ousted, is rather ironical This becomes all the more powerful when we are informed of how proud he was, that he did not attend his daughters wedding because he was not allowed out of jail on his own recognizance and refused to go with a warden in tow. He went to jail nine times, was a staunch supporter of Mahatma Gandhi and educated his daughter who then spurned rich suitors “for a graduate girl must have a graduate husband” and both grandparents speak of this with pride.

Health, Wealth, Name and Fame [multi-frame]

The recordings are candid but curiously censored, revealing nothing that could compromise the family, nor say much about Gautam or his parents, or who is the vocal, self proclaimed new-age Californian spiritualist etc. I felt as if I was invited to visit and then told to stand on the side-lines while he decides which frame I can see. So while he reveals aspects of the inner sanctum he is not entirely uninhibited about it; projecting selected memories.

Stills from 'I'm Leaving' [ multi-frame]

He plays with them, overlaying the context; de-contextualizes it and little details make-up a complex collage of the socio-cultural moorings of the Kansara family without a deliberate probing for identity. However, one remains unclear about what exactly he is looking for or trying to say within this, for even though selective, there is too much multi-layered material to grasp which makes for tedious viewing. His attempt to present how inseparable we become from the spaces we inhabit doesn’t seem engaging or clear enough. I found the irony of a freedom fighter’s daughter migrating from India to UK before independence was officially declared, to be a curious inheritance for the artist four times removed from the generation of freedom fighters, now living and working in New York; of significant interest at many levels, but this was not investigated enough and one remains uniformed of the impact it had on the father-daughter relationship and more as a consequence of.



Dal, Bhat, Roti. Shak [ 12 prints]

Kansara, through his family’s recollection is able to present a rather unique widow into our post-colonial cultural make-up. The videos are engaging at certain levels, and I was drawn to his involvement with an idea that has taken many years, been re-visited and re-recorded and technically manipulated to explore seemingly mundane footage, but he does not make any specific point either sentimental or historic. He is exploring facets of identity and history and through this something that is seemingly relevant to him, but basically he just rambles on without leading anywhere that makes me re-think this information which I already know at an objective/ historic/social level. What he has is interesting archival material and if he can get beyond the sentimental or go deeper into it, perhaps something of significance will emerge.

An Ambitious Quest - Seema Kohli, video film Review

Dabbling in philosophy does not lead to Self Realization; here honesty is the best policy. Seema Kohli is primarily a painter who works on canvas, creating a filigree of forms mythical and imagined. Her decade-old preoccupation with Hindu philosophy is currently explored via film where she attempts “painting intangible aspects of time, energy and creation” through a video installation in two parts, projected simultaneously on adjacent walls. The film ‘Swayam Siddha - The Self Realized’ has been shown in Delhi, Spain, New Jersey and Singapore and received among others, the Gold award at the Florence Biennale, 2009.


At best, Self Realization is an ambitious quest for accomplished yogis and to portray this via video-art is a challenge. The subject is rooted in the physical dimension of living not divorced from it, but Seema has chosen a quasi-abstract route which makes the films virtually incomprehensible. Sanskrti shlokas are chanted soulfully by Vidya Rao and the young dancer Himani Khurana, in a contemporary black dress is graceful as she presents movement of time and energy. Attired in black trousers and T shirt, Seema too participates in the performance. Words are transposed onto crowded visuals of performers walking and dancing through fabric lengths with canvasses placed against walls and on the floor. Images from Kohli’s paintings are projected over their bodies and juxtaposed on the entire clip, creating a visual overload. Watching 6-7 minutes of two such videos simultaneously is tedious and the sub-text appears more like jargon than insights.

Seema uses symbols from traditional sources, where an earthen pot symbolizes the golden womb or ‘Hiranyagarbha’ and red foot-prints on the floor are reminiscent of the first steps a Hindu bride takes into her matrimonial home. Corrugated paper and bubble wrap are some contemporary elements she infuses into this film, but the concepts are clichéd. Time or ‘Kaal’ is presented literally through the colour black; or wrapping the body in corrugated paper symbolizes birth, then unravelling and re-wrapping in bubble-wrap it becomes re-birth. Some visual effects are quite dramatic and Seema’s serene countenance is sincere but for most frames she is covered with or dripping water or red and yellow paint, spilling onto the floor, evocative of blood and excreta. Unlike yogic lore, this isn’t an inspiring journey and as art, leaves wide open the question of art and what we present under its guise.

Art can raise questions and also our awareness of issues - political, religious, profane and spiritual. It can express the artist’s point of view, and angst within specified contexts. It can be an aspiration, provoke and also heal. It does all or any of this through a cultivated, individual vocabulary, but a pre-requisite is that the message be understood. The spiritual experience is essentially intangible and Seema’s task is challenging but having said that, if I am watching a work of art that is intended to present ‘The Self Realized’ then I am not interested in being entertained by a beautiful dancer or sonorous chants. The dance and music have to convey some insight and /or experience of some dimension that is referred to as ‘The Self Realized’.

A complex subject of much interest globally at this point in time, where material obsession and a sense of lack, as opposed to abundance has created violence and terror of great proportions, disrupting daily life, taking us deeper into ourselves; one anticipates some measure of insight that can shed light on the ancient wisdom of the Vedas to inspire hope towards peace and harmony in frenetic contemporary living. What comes across here is that Seema is caught up in the written word without reflecting upon her own experience of living enough, to present a clear perspective of her peculiar journey/experience or aspiration in this context.

The Self Realized is he or she who has achieved liberation. They are not bound by or within the drama of the world but fully conscious of mind, body and spirit and their connection to the super-conscious. They live in the bliss of awareness that the world is nothing but an illusion created through their own imagined mind. They have complete mastery over thought, for they have mastered fear. Masters have control because they have clarity of thought, because they have clarity of feeling and therefore of intent. This is Self Realization, a knowing that most of us are seeking.

Those who have evolved enough to understand the meaning of Self Realization, recognise the merit of deep reflection and internal reference of each and every experience and thought or feeling therein, towards mastering their minds. You do not have to retire to the Himalayas, but you do have to retreat within yourself more and more till such time as desires diminish and with it the pangs of the world and its illusionary drama. Self realization may well be an ‘aspiration’ for the artist, but for the master it is but a ‘process’, evolving through living, something you will acquire if you live with utmost honesty to yourself. Neither this, nor quietude or clarity, all of which are a pre-requisite of the self-realized, is even glimpsed in this film. What we see instead is a confused, meandering mind, not a master of it.