Exhibition Testimony #7: Wake at Fitzrovia Gallery

The overcast sky was singing of rain and shine when I caught Wake at The Fitzrovia Gallery. A crowd had already assembled in this gallery that’s longer than it’s wider. I was cornered by the curators next to the drinks bucket. Mila Rae Sarabhai knows things are serious when the apple juice gets involved, so she helped herself to a carton.

“The sugar in the juice will probably do more for you than the alcohol,” remarked Shiv Lalgi, a grey sweater loosely hugging her shoulders that were delicately tattooed like embroidery.

Mila sipped her juice as an antidote to sleep-deprivation, although she didn’t look it. Both feel there wasn’t much of a community of brown artists at the Slade, so they’ve taken matters into their own hands.

“South Asian art is also really in right now,” Shiv stated.

I ventured, “It’s funny isn’t it that the people who deem South Asian art to be in are usually…”

“… not South Asian, I know,” she completed with a roll of the eyes, further consolidating the importance of this show.

Mila added, “There are so many subtleties to our culture which are clear in these artworks… but you don’t have to be a part of the culture to get them, it’s just more instinctual if you are.” Spotting some ungreeted guests, she skipped off in their direction, red blouse and silky hair billowing behind her. Shiv had also been whisked away, so I decided look around and educate myself on my own culture.

A painting was beckoning me from across the gallery and I couldn’t resist its pull. I was caught in the unbreakable stare of a young girl in plaits biting into a Fruit of Shame. Despite Komal Bakshi’s title of the piece, a delectable defiance hums from this scene. No shame inhibits how the linen glitters under the light or the way the grass dances upwards, charmed by Komal’s airy brushstrokes. Crows conversing by her side, her plaits outlined by zapping brushstrokes, and the periphery of the scene dissolving into nothingness; it was like being transfixed by some fantastical vision. To me, this painting exemplifies many of themes and aesthetic qualities reverberating through the exhibition.

The human figure anchors this show, through the limbs, bodies, and things we ornament those bodies with.

Real ribbons tie this little girl’s plaits, the materiality of Komal’s art similar to how others in the show resist their physical flatness.

A humid haze rises off the colour palette of this and many other works, an Amazonian explosion of greens, browns, and yellows.

The painting which then greeted me as I whirled around made me doubt if there was just alcohol in my plastic cup. The feverish tension of every object threatens to shatter such a hallucinatory scene. Zehra Marikar calls this freeze-frame on the brink of collapse, safety matches. A poster of a matchbox brand decorates the wall over a paisley plastic chair with some matches burning underneath. A naked woman faces away while a clothed woman is missing a face, the only identification we’re allowed is with a large, red, disembodied eye. And what of that pigeon in flight?! Moments of extraordinary detail, such as the anatomy of the bird, are repelled by the haunting obscurity of shadeless walls and floors. The adverts behind the figures makes the whole ensemble read like disparate fragments of a diaspora, colliding into a collage at once familiar and alienating.

Let’s explore the body in this show, going from macro to micro.

A figure races on a motorbike past a woodland shack. Motion is arrested through dragging brushstrokes; a blur of hair, skin, and landscape kissed by air resistance. But who’s that pair in the background, glowing inhumanly green? Uday Banerjee’s 17  is like spotting some bizarre details in a random photograph; a mechanical hallucination or something supernatural? none can tell. There’s an affectionate union between the naturalistic colour palette applied on wood. The material absorbs and emits the hues of a verdant subcontinent, exploding with life upon those mysterious figures whether they be spirits or fabrication.

Shiv’s small-scale paintings appear as surviving remnants of a disturbing dream long-forgotten. Not quite a nightmare but something that makes you raise your eyebrows when you awake fitfully. Parts of people’s bodies - a pair of feet here, interlocked hands there, two faces kissing to get it over with – appear disembodied not just from their owners but from causality itself. Shiv’s deft blending and application of paint renders the flesh in an unnatural light, representing a more sinister aspect to the tropical colours rebounding through the show. What cruel intent props up the stance of those feet? What ritual, secret and intimate, unites these arms? What misery compels these lovers to hate? The only titled piece of the bunch, Scatter captures the slippage of fleeting things (time being the most slippery) as hair drifting through fingers. The futility of resisting an unstoppable force is mirrored in the disarmingly fine lines, a tangle of scratches, that Shiv’s uncoiled.

Two watercoloured paintings measured me with their indifference. I was dwarfed by their stares. These faces are done with such perfectly sparing quantities of paint, and they vibrate with emotion. The scales of colour are balanced so harmoniously, like a vivid memory that refuses to leave you. Intimidated by Aparna Mitra’s untitled judges, I finally managed to turn away.

As the alcohol wrapped me around its finger, I was having difficulty telling what I was looking at here. Mortal injury? Environmental damage? Aftermath of a rage? Co-curator Mila provides an additional interpretation through the title, Blood from a stone. The visceral imagery outgrows the miniscule size of its dimensions with a ghostly effect. Juxtaposed against the conventional framing of this etching, it feels like some historical archive preserved for posterity. One may vainly question what’s to be learnt here…

Displayed on a cross-bar of mild steel is a constellation of jewelled bindi, a type of ornamentation worn around the eyes and the forehead. Even the D-rings used to hang the piece from the wall are adorned. If we can understand connection by Eshq Hasnath certainly creates a striking deadlock between the laborious and the ostentatious; the delicately stuck and the sturdily screwed. I faintly remember Eshq, who was as drunk as I with an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips, explaining the artwork as honouring a dying industry or craft. He traipsed off to have his cigarette ignited before we reached the end of the explanation, so I apologise for not doing this review justice.

I had to put my drink down as I dizzyingly plummeted into Mahek Sethia’s indescribably weird cellular forms. These circular pieces are aptly titled In – Between because not only do they blur the distinction between painting and drawing but human and animal too. The membranous structures floating around in this greyscale microscopic snapshot, held together by explosive tendrils, apparently come from both human and animal cells. We’ve reached the final frontier of the body, anything smaller is marked by the elementary indifference of atoms. It is at this last stop where things look recognisably bodily that Mahek is exploring the nature of forms and how they’re sites of commonality rather than difference.

It's only natural that works focussing so intently on the human form have a body of their own. The material becomes corporeal. Supposedly flat works like paintings and prints protrude off the surface, anathema to flatness. The title of the series from which Aastha Patel has shown her artworks merely proves my point; Material Bodies.

No specific part of the body is discernible in the UV print job she’s carried out on a quilt and a piece of woven cane paper. Yet, both materials (especially the soft quilt) exude the sensual warmth of skin. The form and texture of the fabric takes on a fleshy quality that’s substantially loving, as if locked in a deep and dissolving embrace.

I came across something rather peculiar that set my head spinning. This untitled artwork by Mila features the collar of a kurta – a South Asian tunic - image transferred onto a piece of khadi. This handspun fabric is usually what kurtas are made out of. The representation of the thing becomes the thing itself. Stretched over a piece of board, it looks like the actual garment was neatly folded and placed collar-side-up. My mind turned towards all manner of desperate interpretations on who this ghostly garment belongs to and what untold scenes it’s witnessed.   

Right next to Mila’s works is Vihaan Surya Singh’s sublime self portrait as bishen. On a photograph of an androgynously nude figure floating listlessly in a black void, Vihaan has meticulously water-coloured a white lace dress. At first glance I thought it was a real dress plastered over the photograph; so fine is the detail with which Vihan’s brush has weaved this clothing. The paint, softly protruding off the print, accentuates the figure with the delicacy of lace. I see protection in this dress. A suit of armour against whatever desolation has twisted our figure’s appearance into strained helplessness.

A little girl draped in a dupatta gazes out the window from her bed. There’s a flat pouch of Capri-sun lying disconsolately on the window sill. Her gaze is fixed on a marvellous butterfly rendered – just like the juice pouch – in ravishing dabs of thick paint and modelling paste that leap off the canvas. It takes a moment to notice the papery wings on the girl’s back; her lines of imagination and reality becoming gloriously hazy, much like the mixture of colour in this scene. Green and orange flood through the window and swirl with the pastel purples and greens of her bedroom, all the while dripping off the canvas in a way that’s every art hander’s nightmare. Longing for my Metamorphosis by Aanya Mukhtyar is a textural feast that balances the boisterous and dainty. Transfixed, I imagined all the times I’d seen that little girl’s wistful look on my sister and female cousins while they were growing up. An expression to flee, even if just for a night, from the strictures of a suffocating household. I guess this is what Mila meant by reading the subtleties of the culture.

I find the bathroom sink to be such a metaphysically strange place. Every day, we come face to face with the best and worst parts of us over this shiny bit of weirdly shaped porcelain. We spit, cry, and shed bits of ourselves into this emotionally charged drain. Umar Ahmed’s NOT A BED OF ROSES painfully depicts this perplexing place by putting us in the eyes of someone helplessly clinging onto a sink. An unrequited bouquet of roses stains the oppressive whiteness like blood. The lighting is harsh and the colours are muddled, as if seen through streaming tears.

Right next to this painting is Intezaar. The back of someone’s head resting upon a pillow, giving us the cold shoulder. Were the roses intended for them? I’d easily mistake this for a deathbed if there wasn’t such palpable longing radiating off its occupant. Both paintings are lashed together with psychotic brushstrokes that test the durability of the canvas, every emotion scratched on there… paint burrowing into these trenches like mud.

Woefully patriarchal though South Asian culture sometimes is, the quintessence of every brown household is the stolid matriarch. The formidable grandmother who loves boundlessly yet won’t hesitate to thrash you up and down the courtyard. I remember my own terrifying granny who gave me a beating for the ages when I drew on the wallpaper with lipstick, balancing the scales with enduring affection afterwards. They’re instantly recognisable with their immovable frame draped in a billowing shawl. One can’t sing their praises enough, yet the artists in this show have certainly tried.

There’s something sombre in the visage of this matriarch, eyes listlessly closed as she carries a younger woman on her back like the pillar she is. She assumes her burden with a troublesome grace, trudging through this spectral scene where shadows dance uncertainly around her. Aptly titled All is Lost Without You, Rachna Johal’s soft, almost translucent application of colour reflects a bitter recognition that comes with adulthood; the realisation of who really has been running the show this whole time.

Down the wall is a piece as puzzling as it’s simple. On a large sheet of paper is a graphite drawing of an aged woman at rest; nothing else. But the image splinters as you realise it’s two moments in time projected over each other. There’s at once a childlike wonder and a deathly pallor on her face. Her hands and feet, even the edges of her shawl, shift out of phase. But the essential outline of her being remains. Despite my disinclination towards religion, it’s hard not to see this image as the soul departing her body. Farwa Tahir calls this, nargis.

A canopy of trees spreads overhead, branches interlocking like spider’s legs. Whatever forces are at play here seem equal parts sinister and whimsical; the influence of some ancient woodland spirits. In the clearing stands an old woman, her shawl blowing over her face, the marble-like folds of the fabric painted delicately. I don’t see her face but I can imagine, despite the circumstances, an expression of contentment upon her. She stands in surrender to her senses, feeling the air on her skin, the earth beneath her feet, and arrows of time piercing through her. I’ll hasten to say this is the happiest she’s felt in a very long time. One is then invited to ponder the normal conditions of her life from which she’s having respite from. This transcendent scene, called Golconda, is also from Uday Banerjee who painted the man riding past a wooded shack earlier. He reverently paints the forest like crystals catching marvellous light. No wonder these works feel like altar pieces.

Much like the matriarch in Golconda, I stood there luxuriating in the sounds and sights around me. Laughter and gossip rebounded around the room as people stood in huddles around the artworks. The veil between the inner and outer world thinning through everyone’s interpretation. I was sufficiently drunk that sticking around any longer would risk making a fool out of myself. I raised the can of Peroni in honour to these people and took my leave.

On my way out, I pieced together a message through a couple of C-type prints stuck to the wall;

a gruesome love letter

to rich food

and rich men,

on to gorging on both

with abandon

abandon

abandon

abandon

abandon

Entitled Slaughterhouse, the scenes depicted in these photographs are obscure and strange. But Vaishnavi Sathish has arranged them with such a poetic melody, echoing the feminine confidence of the show with pitch perfection.

It was dark outside and looking through the window of Fitzrovia Gallery I saw a vibrant community willing to keep their door open for you late into the night.