A new solo by acclaimed artist Anju Dodiya

‘Necklace of Echoes’ is the title of a new solo by acclaimed artist Anju Dodiya. This exhibition features a suite of self-portraits. They all have been cast in the mode of suffering.

Lying beneath the intricate paraphernalia of both art-historical and autobiographical citations, which are invariably associated with her work, she chooses to reflect on two basic and opposite conditions in her paintings - selfhood wounded, and one armored against hurt. In the present series of her works, Anju Dodiya keeps her citationality to a bare minimum. This allows the true theme to emerge.

The work exudes the artist's subjectivity, which is trapped by its own constructs, gushing for burst and aching for release. The new paintings as if evoke a thumri singer’s melancholia, with blood clotting into artifacts and sombre song reverberating with the echoing sound of shattering glass.

The artist meditates on the sinister versatility of the ornamental necklace that has repeatedly appeared in her work as an ambivalent motif. It connotes honor, adornment and talismanic value. It also suggests greed, humiliation and death. The necklace is projected as both armor and noose - an abacus of sin that drags the wearer down to perdition.

Art critic and author of the catalogue essay, Nancy Adajania, notes: “The poisons of avarice and aggression are released through a ritual bloodletting in 'Falling Glass', with the artist's doppelganger restraining her with a neck-lock. For Dodiya, painting is a martial art: in 'Promise', she balances the torsion of creativity with the traction of pain, maintaining this unsteady equilibrium even at the risk of appearing retro-romantic.”

The painting epitomizing this suite is 'Finger Necklace'. The accompanying essay elaborates:

“It is named after the tragic hero of the Buddhist parable of Angulimala, an aristocrat's son who was made to believe that he would achieve divinity if he killed a thousand people and wore a necklace made from their fingers. In Anju Dodiya's version, he could be an artist making an inventory of all the little suicides involved in sending art-works into the world, the self-mortgaged against fame.

"Or he could be a contemporary terrorist, lured with the promise of paradise into killing innocent people. The artist, masquerading as Angulimala, points towards 'self-forgetfulness', the ability to pour one's personal anguish into the larger suffering of humankind, so achieving a momentary transcendence.”

The exhibition takes place at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi.