Lounge
How artist Veer Munshi integrates beauty and conflict in his work
Summary
Veer Munshi on his first solo in the US, why his practice is built on Kashmir—both in terms of subject and belonging—and the importance of documenting
At a lecture at Stanford University, US, during India Dialog 2024, Veer Munshi said, “I identify as a Kashmiri artist in India... As much as my art has explored pain and violence because of my own displacement, it also explores the value and strength of art as a collective sphere."
Munshi is holding his first solo show, Healing Wounds, in the US at Aicon Gallery in New York. “I call it Healing Wounds because it is in continuation of what I have been doing with reference to Kashmir: political migration, displacement, archiving the material time and again. What is new is the materials. This particular body of work has come from my Shrapnel series (2010). Those were the fragments which I have seen and experienced on visits to Kashmir: the debris that is strewn after stone-pelting or a bomb blast, and which changes the landscape," says the artist, who studied fine arts from M.S. University Baroda.
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Munshi’s work is moored culturally, emotionally and geographically in Kashmir, “subject wise and belonging wise".
If Shrapnel conveyed pain, anguish, destruction, in Healing Wounds he has brought together the shrapnel pieces, hand-painted on wood in kari-e-kalamkari and papier mâché techniques, to create Kashmiri “carpets"—lush, blooming like Srinagar’s famed Mughal gardens, and rich in motifs.
That Munshi prefers large dimensions is evident from the size of the carpets, which are evocatively titled: Jannate-be-Nazir (matchless place; 89x94 inches); Dastgiir (protector; 94x46 inches); Meeraas (inheritance; 94x94 inches).
Take Dastgiir, for instance. At the heart of the work is the 19th century shrine of Dastgeer Sahib, symbolic of the Valley’s Sufi tradition, revered by people of all faiths. It was damaged in a fire in 2012 and subsequently rebuilt. It is also a showcase of Kashmir’s rich handicrafts; the ceiling is in khatamband style, and the walls in papier mâché, crafts which Munshi employs and spotlights in his works. You will also identify a hangul (Kashmir stag), endemic to Kashmir and classified as critically endangered, being chased by a tiger, perhaps indicating that danger is always looming large. Each carpet tells a story.
Similarly, in Meeraas, one can see the ruins of the ancient temple of Awantipora, Sufi shrines, and the Shankaracharya temple that towers over Srinagar. There are the famed houseboats on Dal Lake, and tongas, once a popular mode of transport.
But these carpets are not whole, they have gaps. “The tapestry is fractured because our identity is fractured," says the 69-year-old artist, who like most Kashmiri Pandits was forced to leave the Valley in 1990.
Forced displacement has escalated the world over in recent times, but this is a subject that has consumed Munshi for over three decades. “Naturally, you are an artist, you have an expression, you have to respond. And when it’s personal, it becomes much more important. That’s why I don’t do what happens in other places. My main journey is what my personal experience is. I like to be engaged with the problem. I do what happens in Kashmir."
MEMORY MAP
The centrepiece of the show is the installation Qayaam-gah (resting place), which replicates a Kashmiri dargah or Sufi shrine with its lattice work, and builds on his earlier work at the Kochi Biennale 2018. “There’s a door (to the shrine) but it’s shut, so you go around it like a parikrama (paying obeisance) and peep inside and see something mysterious. There are caskets inside and skeletons painted in papier mâché," says Munshi, who uses a range of mediums, including videos and photographs. “I like the scale of installations. I want to enter into a space where there are two or three dimensions."
He is also restaging We’re Inside the Fire, Looking for the Dark (2017), which pays tribute to Kashmir’s famous poets, from the 14th century to the present times: Lal Ded, Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor, Allama Iqbal, Saadat Hasan Manto, Dinanath Nadim and Agha Shahid Ali. The title of the installation is a line from Shahid Ali’s poem A Country without Post Office. It features six skulls in papier mâché painted on resin. Accompanying the skulls are headphones playing their poems—for instance, art critic Ranjit Hoskote has given voice to Agha Shahid’s poem and historian Sohail Hashmi is reading Manto.
Munshi says the sorrow of Kashmir is the cultural loss, which he documents through his work. He gives the example of his photographic archive of abandoned Kashmiri Pandit houses with their distinct architecture and woodwork. “This project was also a reaction. I was looking for my house (in 2008), which had been burnt down. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I thought painting them would be an overreaction. So I photographed the houses. I think many of those houses are not there now."
Munshi says he’s been propagating for a museum, a Kashmir cultural resource centre. “We archive so that the material is read, discovered or researched for what happened in this period. Your third generation might ask you who you are, where are we from? The museum will have some of the answers. So, these motifs in my work, like a battein (Kashmiri Pandit woman) becomes research material: Who is this woman, why is she dressed like that? One thing leads to another to understand where is this work coming from. And that’s why you produce art. If there’s no reference, you will not research."
At the same time, he rues that we don’t have a culture of museums. “We understand ashrams, temples, not museums. But even if one has to build a temple, then one needs to build it with thought. At least the structure/architecture should talk about our history," he reasons.
A return to roots
Munshi’s initial paintings in the early 1990s after leaving Kashmir were unsettling, portraying violence and pain, a reaction to the upheaval in Kashmir. Take, for instance, the painting Terrorist on the Floating Land, which shows a hairy man, head and face bandaged, holding an AK-47, with a blood-red Dal Lake in the background. A visit to Jammu, where a majority of Kashmiri Pandits fled, resulted in Hope against Hope (1991), which shows a group of people, perhaps waiting for relief, the women in traditional attire no longer worn today. “Yes, I have also matured in my ways, understand technicalities and been around the world. You have to move ahead and push things beyond what you think can happen and make statements."
Interestingly, his Zodiac series of 12 paintings in early 2000s was not related to Kashmir. Combining portraiture with calendar art, he paid tribute to people he has been inspired by, like Van Gogh, Picasso and M.K. Gandhi. He narrates that he then went to Kashmir, witnessed something, and returned to his original subject. “I thought I am meant to do this. That’s how my journey has been—I go to the Valley and something emerges out of it."
How does he juxtapose pain and beauty? People, he says, come to Kashmir for its beauty, but post-1990 one cannot overlook the conflict. “That is the struggle of an artist, how do you build this language where both will co-exist, have relevance...because there is no roadmap for it. I don’t know how successful I have been, but I am trying to go even deeper...creating a layer of archiving material, what we have lost (or are losing) in 35 years: Our tradition, art, heritage, cultural aspects, iconography."
Munshi, who visits Kashmir often and works with local artists and craftsmen, says he gets his oxygen from there. “Not from the scenic place... but by talking to people, walking in the downtown, trying to understand conflict differently. I like the inclusiveness of other people. I realised there’s no point sitting in the studio. I have to go more to where the subject is, or, rather, be part of it. I don’t want to be a reporter, I want to be a researcher. How you can position yourself, and contribute towards something. That is healing."
‘Healing Wounds’ is on till 30 March at Aicon Gallery, New York.
