CAN YOU HEAR ME?

CAN YOU HEAR ME?

Can You Hear Me? – the premier showing of New Delhi based curator Phalguni Guliani’s exhibition series that spotlights female voices forging new ground in South Asian contemporary art. Taking off from Vidha Saumya’s 2016 biro drawing ‘They were not trying to teach us poetry, they were trying to train us’ which Guliani describes as a site for curatorial impetus offering itself in registers both linguistic and visual; the exhibition showcases works that simultaneously extend and upend, the formal languages of abstraction and their suspension in a Beckettian order of wait and power. Working across the mediums of installation, film, painting and book-making, three artists come together to push beyond the neat categorizations of “feminist art” that first gained prominence in the western art world in the 1970s, by offering a fresh take on the lived experiences and salient realities of womanhood in modern day India.

Dotted along the riverbanks of the picturesque Gihon, the entrance facade is where viewers will encounter the exhibition’s first display even before they set foot inside the galleries at Red Mill. This location of the VSC grounds set amidst the quietude of the northern Green Mountains, and its legacy of being amongst the United States’ leading residency sites for thinkers and makers to gather in a truly catholic exchange of ideas, is not lost on Vidha Saumya’s Reading List. A commanding prose poem in vinyl; her installation greets visitors with a potentially endless list of names, gathered and routinely updated by the artist, of authors from India “who should be on global reading lists”. Speaking from her experience as a woman of color in the academie in Finland where she is currently based, Saumya says “as I read my way through list after list, helpfully extended towards me, I encountered many silences. And to mend those silences, these names were my instinctual response.” In a gesture that acknowledges the specificity of Saumya’s position, a second interactive component inside the gallery invites viewers to add their own names to the list, thereby remedying a unique silence that each of us carries within ourselves.

Advancing this theme of the ‘mended’, are a suite of Biraaj Dodiya’s oil paintings hung on the gallery’s main frontal wall. Infused with a sudden formalistic intervention of color on to an otherwise sparsely chromatic surface, Dodiya’s canvases transform into almost sculptural objects through repeated processes of removal and repair that voice a distinct expression of grief for the artist. Head sized and therefore encouraging viewers to gaze directly at the precise balance they strike between material proposition and cancellation, Dodiya’s often-nocturnal landscapes and doubly veiled horizons were each made in the two years of the pandemic; a time the artist describes as one of “horror, wonder and collective isolation.” Visitors will recognize this sense of ‘being away together’ in pieces like Table Land and Knife and Water – pairings at once strange and strangely familiar – that evoke both distance and temporality in the same indistinguishable lull that not too long ago filled all our covidine worlds. What is left of a world after pain punctures through it like the line on The Rising she asks – “a pause; a pulse runs through. The wayward laws of physics remind us, there are endings, and there is life.”

Punctuating the gallery space in this same tenor of loss and longing is The Last Mango Before the Monsoon – one of the earliest video-works of Payal Kapadia, giving viewers a special insight into the now celebrated filmmaker’s formative cinematic language. As poetic montages shuffle between workmen setting up in a forest, and the languid yearning shared between a mother and daughter, we are pushed to introspect whether the thing both duos are searching for is indeed the same? By using minimal dialogue interspersed with painterly interjections, the artist builds a mesmerizing portrait of time and relationships. Like Dodiya before her, Kapadia too shows us how the wait for that which carries us forth, beyond the threshold of grief, can sometimes be as absurd as catching an elephant with a night-time camera, or as intense as a fruit of summer giving way to the tide of seasons; in the same manner she tells us a line makes a cut “through painting, through poetry"

Fittingly amidst this interdisciplinary dialogue then, viewers are taken back to the premise on which the show is built – poetry itself. Next to the salon style alcove that houses Kapadia’s film, we find two hand-crafted artist books in which Vidha Saumya’s verse chronicles her quotidian tussles with race and gender in Finnish society. “I didn’t want to grief to outlive life, so I wrote poems” she tells us in November Salads – a piéce de resistance where the artist frames her response to the countless ‘where are you really from’ questions that immigrants invariably receive, in form of a chance encounter with vegetables offered to her as a lunchtime snack.

This moniker-ing of food, freeing it from the preciousness of its associations as it were, becomes a recurring theme in Saumya’s practice. In September in Helsinki when she jokingly contemplates telling the visa authorities that pomegranate molasses is her reason to stay in Finland, readers are presented with a voice that can ask “why one poem and not another” in a temerity that matches Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation, with a gait that knows it “walks like it pays the rent”, and with a selfhood they are reminded must “rise to revolt, and rest to resist”

This leading notion of the exhibition – the passage of time through the bodies of women – culminates then in its penultimate piece Purdah, an accordion of ink drawings that showcase a group of twenty-five women, performing routine tasks, unclothed and yet under a ‘purdah’ (veil). As each folio unfurls, we see the norm-bending set putting on lipstick under a lamp only to be turned upside down a moment later. We see them reading, bleeding, dancing, at once the Madonna and the whore. And yet in each commonplace gesture played out with punk nonchalance and calculated wit in equal measure, Saumya’s women resist definition, never telling us who they are. Part autobiographical and part fictional, the series made 15 years ago has never been shown before. “The women in these drawings seem to patiently wait their turn” we are told by the artist, who in a playful nod to this display of the multiple selves within an “assumed confine” places a suite of table-top sculptures in conversation with her veiled women.

In this final series – the Anti-sue objects – phalluses fashioned out of wool and wood sit atop sleek metal stands; sometimes ordinary looking and sometimes clumpy, as if about to collapse under their own weight. “They are the opposite of Mary-sue characters who are supposed to be faultless” Saumya explains on her choice to name the individual works after a male philosopher from the Western Canon each. Looking upon the imperfections in Immanuel or Karl then, viewers will find a display that begun by enlisting names far removed from these, coming now a full circle.

For Guliani, who weaves this mis-en-scene, around the idea of ‘listening’ that is presupposed within the title itself – Can You Hear Me? – the recurring motif in the artworks on display, and indeed the thread that brings them together is incidentally an idea of ‘silence’. Whether it is Payal Kapadia’s films where quasi-fictional characters speak via gestures and the slightest change of light, Biraaj Dodiya’s paintings where hope speaks in the quiet whispers of after-grief or the boldness of a lone brushstroke, or Vidha Saumya’s veiled women figures and tongue- in-cheek sculptures that set out to remedy the leaden silences her poems encountered; each artist makes a leap across the chasm of unspeakability between the uncanny and the domestic, between the perceived and the perceiving, and ultimately between fear and hope.

Date 09-05-2022