How artist Saubiya Chasmawala turned erasures into compassionate works of art

In my mind, I compare looking at photographs of one’s childhood to throwing a beloved object into the sea. It returns, undoubtedly, but it appears altered, and we cannot help but admire the object for the novel and unexpected attributes it reveals itself to have. It reminds us that we too have transformed in the interim, washed by the waves of time. It is even stranger to look at photographs of someone else’s childhood. We don’t have the memories or the myths to enter them and we must look for portals that emerge from our own experiences. To me, the photographs that artist Saubiya Chasmawala has used for almost a decade in her paintings are nevertheless quite familiar. I have known first-hand the kind of grave sites that her family made pilgrimages to when she was a child. I know the abstraction that such a visit requires—one is there to attend to a haunting presence, to revere it, and to acknowledge the power that a formless force can have on one’s spiritual imagination.

Chasmawala has worked on these photographs in different ways over time. Early on, she would conceal the faces of the visitors—all members of her family—making us think we are looking at ghosts. She has made incisions into the surfaces of the paper, bound bodies with thread, and expressed a sense of longing and frustration through washes of white that obliterate the surrounding landscape, allowing us viewers to travel from the particular event depicted to a contemplation of wounding. How porous the appearance of injury and healing can be when it is distilled into a moment! The 35-year-old artist now works on the photographs in a more measured manner. Some examples of this current work can be seen at Intersections: Sites of Becoming, on view till 30 April at Arthshila, New Delhi, to celebrate 50 years of the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation. The exhibition and public programmes feature a cross-section of practitioners supported by the Foundation over the past five decades.

During a conversation with Chasmawala, the idea of the wound as an opening seems persistently present in her mind. “In art school I began questioning everything, and it reflected in my work as well, with incisions on canvas and paper,” says the artist, recalling her time at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda. The incisions in those early paintings were meant to take out Arabic letters that she had written, symbolising a rift, the unmooring of belief from her sense of self. But looking further, the incisions eventually led to a new space, a kind of abstraction in which it was possible to contemplate the infinite through a distance.

Chasmawala’s paintings in her solo show Batin, at Tarq, Mumbai, in 2019, captured this shift. The sinuous forms of the Arabic script were the focus. The letters appeared like gestures, recording the movements of her body. At times, the letters were recognisable but they did not form words that held meaning and were not meant to be read out. This choice leant into the title Batin, which in Sufism refers to the hidden, the symbolic, the secret. But there was also an acceptance and a celebration that Chasmawala was enacting.

South Asian Muslims often learn to read Arabic letters without learning the language itself, and this obfuscation of meaning within a religious practice that is supposed to hold deep meaning was the paradox that she was confronting through Batin. “There was an acceptance after that. I spent so much time in my childhood reading and reciting those verses, and they will always remain a part of me,” she explained. Some of these paintings were made with ink and others with saffron as a pigment, often used in her family to write verses on paper that are then dissolved into water to make healing potions.

In the past few months, Chasmawala has returned to her family albums, looking afresh at the compositions her father painstakingly made on film during their travels to mausoleums in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and parts of western India in the 1990s. A selection of those paintings, with Arabic letters in gold leaf inscribed on the photos, were also showcased at the India Art Fair in February. A decade ago, her need to work with these photographs came from the distance she felt from her family for the first time while being away at an art residency. These works, however, attempt repair. The frenetic gestures of erasure are more carefully considered through the use of contained shapes and washes. “I was looking at them with more compassion,” says the artist, “I felt a greater sense of peace.” From this sense of resolution, Chasmawala is moving towards abstraction.

During our call, she shows me a work in progress, a lattice in gold bound with black thread, a filament symbolising the way people give shape to a wish. This turn in Chasmawala’s practice continues her engagement with devotion, from a place that brings together the charged experiences of her childhood reflected through a study of abstraction. “Perhaps, I have always communicated better through erasures,” she reflects. Sometimes, what disappears becomes most visible.

Zeenat Nagree is an independent writer and curator living between Bombay and Montréal.