BackBeauty secrets
Beauty secrets
PremiumEye candy: (left) A work from The Barodians by Abir Karmakar; and Nothing to know about it by Sheila Makhijani.
A dark female figure squats, headless and emaciated, ambiguously impaled above a rough-cut stump of wood. In one hand, she demurely holds a teacup, in the other, an ornamented primate skull. From the hole in her neck spray frozen, stylized jets of blood. Bharti Kher pushes what has always been her fraught relationship with conventional notions of femininity into new territory with this sculpture, And all the while the benevolent slept, a grotesque visual riddle that hovers between—and refuses to settle upon—civilization or savagery. The piece takes a familiar iconographical image, the decapitated Chhinnamasta form of the goddess, and stages it as the starting point for an excursion to the dark side—tying the themes of sex, death, beauty and horror into a disturbing knot. But is it beautiful?
Sinha curates Mutant Beauty with an eye fixed on the implications of this process; in her concept note, she invites the 14 participating artists to “create their own monument to beauty, a monument that would be inscribed with its own past".
Sunil Gawde takes up the challenge with a piece that plays on a theme rhapsodized by 1,000 Urdu poets: the moth and the flame. In his untitled installation, a giant light bulb—an object that reappears throughout the artist’s recent work—hangs in an otherwise dark space, emitting a low blue glow, its skin crawling with small sculptures of winged insects and moths. But here the scene is not one of annihilation into the beloved—the insects seem just fine. The expected denouement has been suspended, the bulb’s light is cool, and the moths stand there wondering what to do next.
Nothing to know about it, or so warns the title of Sheila Makhijani’s dense oil painting; her sole contribution to the show presents an enigmatic account of beauty that stands at a remove from the more representational work of artists such as Karmakar and Gawde. An abstract piece, it approaches the question from an oblique angle, with cellular, geometric forms woven in shades of pink and thick, laddered lines that twist around each other, overlapping to create fractured stained-glass patterns and drawing the viewer’s gaze into an otherworldly landscape with few obvious landmarks. There is a rhythmic syncopation at work in this artist’s idiom—one developed with patience and consistency over the years, a visual grammar in which forms emerge as though according to their own, peculiarly organic logic; what it demands of the viewer is an accommodation to its emergent, idiosyncratic aesthetic, its alien beauty.
Elsewhere, among the many other participating artists, Mithu Sen works magic with her installation of dark and delicate lace woven from hair, and Atul Bhalla constructs a mixed-media monument to wasted water and wood— a fountain staircase to nowhere made from workshop castaways and shiny, unresponsive faucets in spate. A review can only scratch the surface of a large show like this, Sinha’s own strange monument: In an art scene that suffers from lackadaisical curating too often built around convenience and commerce, she delivers a conceptually rich spectacle of restless, challenging beauty.
Mutant Beauty is on till 12 January at Anant Art Centre, A/21-22, Sector 5, Noida.
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