‘Woven Nights: An ongoing show creates a dialogue between artists Monika Correa and Seher Shah
In an ongoing show, unique dialogues emerge between Monika Correa’s tapestries and Seher Shah’s recent prints, drawings, and photogravures
At the Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, two artists, separated from one another by age and geography, enter into a dialogue with one another in the exhibition, ‘Woven Nights’. Tapestries by Mumbai-based Monika Correa, and one of India’s leading fibre artists, share space with prints, drawings and photogravures by Seher Shah, who lives and works out of Barcelona. When viewed together, it feels as if the two bodies of works are whispering to one another, united by a language of lyrical minimalism. Gradations of monochrome, and a play of light and shadow, is visible across the works on display. A sense of meditative calm permeates the show, reflecting the slow, process-driven and labour-intensive practices that the two artists follow, with some of the works taking years to be produced.
The recent tapestries by Correa, such as Confused and Four Quarters in unbleached and dyed cotton, are a result of experimentation. “Dismantling parts of the loom, she liberates her threads and works in extra weft to introduce subtle movement and enhance the texture of her elegant works. Tight and loosened, Correa maximizes the woven tradition and wrests it from convention," states the gallery note. A trained microbiologist, who turned to weaving in the 1960s, Correa imbues her tapestries with “a kinetic quality", as art historian Jyotindra Jain once described it in an essay.
Shah also adds a sense of movement to her etchings and photogravures with variations in line, depth and mark-making—she plays with presence and absence through use of materials like graphite, ink, charcoal, dust and iron. “Like Correa’s rethinking of the loom, Shah has repurposed the printing press as a site of discovery rather than a producer of multiples," writes Saira Ansari, an independent writer and researcher, in an essay accompanying the exhibition. One of the highlights of the shows is The Dacca Gauzes, a set of 12 photogravures and three letterpress prints, which respond to Agha Shahid Ali’s poem of the same name. Both the artist and the poet respond to the loss of Bengal’s ethereal muslin due to violence and occupation—themes that continue to be relevant even in contemporary times. The former delves into memories of her maternal family, which lived across cities such as Chittagong, Chennai and Kochi—incidentally each of them situated by the water.
As a viewer, it feels that the geographies that Shah addresses in her works are being reflected in Correa’s tapestries, in which the texture of the fibre resembles veins of the rivers; the intersection of the warp of dyed black cotton with the weft of natural white and dyed handspun wool in Light at the end of the Tunnel, for instance, feel akin to sediment deposits near cotton fields. To me, the show takes on a meta feel, with these fluid expressions being displayed in the city of Mumbai, where water is enmeshed into everyday living.
“Those transparent Dacca Gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew; a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. ‘No one knows,’ my grandmother says, ‘what it was to wear or touch that cloth’…," this verse by Agha Shahid Ali, a poet born in Kashmir, was published in 1987. Shah came across the poem sometime between 2017-18. The words rattled around in her consciousness for many years. The poem evoked memories of her maternal family and the cities that they had lived in. Shah wondered if she could draw her way into Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry. She decided to interpret The Dacca Gauzes in a series of triptychs, with the first of them alluding to the notion of “woven air, running water". Time is an important element in the poem, spanning a hundred years, and Shah tried to find a language that would articulate this. “I tried to work with a language that lies between musical notations and architectural lines. Marks that point to time and structure to marks that look at space and landscapes—these could be calligraphic marks or incomplete perspective lines," she elaborates.
The stanza, “In history we learned: the hands of weavers were amputated, the looms of Bengal silenced, and the cotton shipped raw by the British to England…" was one of the most challenging for Shah.She repeated the marks of the sharpened shuttle of the spindle that weavers use to run through the loom to resemble a knife or a guillotine that wreaked violence on the legacy of the textile.
The next triptych looks at river lines and the quality of light on the traced lines of the Brahmaputra, along the banks of which cotton for muslin was grown. “It is not a cartographic map. The poem speaks of a 100 years of time. I wanted to trace over river fragments over the course of a day," she elaborates. So, for the last triptych in the portfolio, which speaks out the quality of light and a feeling of absence and loss, she made a silver pigment with master printmaker Alistair Gow, who has been her longtime collaborator at the Glasgow Print Studio. They experimented with a technique called chine-collé—a term for two papers being joined together—on Kinugawa Ivory and Rayon Unryu papers. You can see small marks, which could resemble calligraphy or thread on the loom. There is a certain shimmer in the work due to the silver pigment. “How do you draw a state of absence? Alistair and I experimented with a number of other Japanese papers and created a blind chine-collé, in which neither Agha Shahid Ali’s words were present nor was my mark-making. There was only a silver shimmer left on the paper surface," says Shah.
She feels it a matter of privilege to share space with an artist like Correa. Even though hailing from different backgrounds and working with different materials, she finds an affinity with her. “There is something about the slowness of labour and working with materiality. I think we both respect the material we work and a trust in experimentation. This conversation between the works has come together in multiple ways in the exhibition," says Shah.
‘Woven Nights’ can be viewed at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, till 18 October, 11 am to 6.30 pm (closed on Sunday and Monday).
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