Shukla Sawant
Anant Art Gallery - New Delhi
F 213-B, Lado Sarai, 110030 New Delhi, India
August 18, 2009 - September 18, 2009
A Look at Shukla Sawant
by Alana Hunt
The
first images one sees upon entering Shukla Sawant’s current solo
exhibition, "Outside the Fold," are of a young woman’s peeling hands
holding an open book close to her body. The tightness of the image makes
you wonder – if we could see just beyond the frame (or outside the fold), – would we find her face, looking down and reading the pages tha
t rest in her hands, or is she holding the book close to her while gazing off somewhere else? Walk to the end of the room, and there lit softly against the back wall, is a woman’s face now crystallized and hovering itself within the pages of a solid glass book.
What does it mean for a woman to read?
In different times, in different places, to different people and across different kinds of reading material the possible answers to this question appear impossibly endless. But for Pandita Ramabai, the subject of Sawant’s new body of work "Remembering Pandita," reading within the context of nineteenth century India was something that carried her outside the fold of social and religious norms and into a life of radical questioning – particularly in regard to the kinds of social injunctions against women laid down by religious texts. It is this spirit of dissent and heresy that Sawant’s "Remembering Pandita" seeks to celebrate,
However, the story of Pandita Ramabai is only half of the work that makes up Sawant’s "Outside the fold"; "Sirop and Desert Islands and Other Texts" is the other. Similarly drawing upon history (and books), "Sirop and Desert Islands and Other Texts" takes the touristic vision of Mauritius as a tropical paradise and turns it inside out, revealing some of the darker histories such island mono-economies possess through an exploration of indentured labour as a part of colonial ventures and its contemporary legacy. This body of work, which includes print, photography, souvenir scratch cards and a range of sculptural installations involving whips and sugar, stairs and handcuffs, is really brought together by the use of sound that hauntingly connects across the exhibition space both the materials and ideas. Seagulls squawking as waves hit the shore just don’t seem so innocent and sugar isn’t quite so sweet – appearing instead, somehow sharp and dangerous.
On the whole, Shukla Sawant’s "Outside the Fold" is a new body of work that explores histories. But history, as Walter Benjamin has argued, is not something stuck in the past but rather a dialectical image created by the collision of the past into the present – so, in relation to Sawant’s evocation of the past in "Outside the Fold" we can ask: what do the stories of a radical nineteenth century Indian woman and indentured labour in Mauritius illuminate for us in Delhi today?
t rest in her hands, or is she holding the book close to her while gazing off somewhere else? Walk to the end of the room, and there lit softly against the back wall, is a woman’s face now crystallized and hovering itself within the pages of a solid glass book.What does it mean for a woman to read?
In different times, in different places, to different people and across different kinds of reading material the possible answers to this question appear impossibly endless. But for Pandita Ramabai, the subject of Sawant’s new body of work "Remembering Pandita," reading within the context of nineteenth century India was something that carried her outside the fold of social and religious norms and into a life of radical questioning – particularly in regard to the kinds of social injunctions against women laid down by religious texts. It is this spirit of dissent and heresy that Sawant’s "Remembering Pandita" seeks to celebrate,
However, the story of Pandita Ramabai is only half of the work that makes up Sawant’s "Outside the fold"; "Sirop and Desert Islands and Other Texts" is the other. Similarly drawing upon history (and books), "Sirop and Desert Islands and Other Texts" takes the touristic vision of Mauritius as a tropical paradise and turns it inside out, revealing some of the darker histories such island mono-economies possess through an exploration of indentured labour as a part of colonial ventures and its contemporary legacy. This body of work, which includes print, photography, souvenir scratch cards and a range of sculptural installations involving whips and sugar, stairs and handcuffs, is really brought together by the use of sound that hauntingly connects across the exhibition space both the materials and ideas. Seagulls squawking as waves hit the shore just don’t seem so innocent and sugar isn’t quite so sweet – appearing instead, somehow sharp and dangerous.
On the whole, Shukla Sawant’s "Outside the Fold" is a new body of work that explores histories. But history, as Walter Benjamin has argued, is not something stuck in the past but rather a dialectical image created by the collision of the past into the present – so, in relation to Sawant’s evocation of the past in "Outside the Fold" we can ask: what do the stories of a radical nineteenth century Indian woman and indentured labour in Mauritius illuminate for us in Delhi today?
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