Painterly meditation on the passage of nature’s cycle in a woman’s life

The woman is at the center of love and life cycles, growth and decay – the various emotions and stages of her life in a new series of works by one of India’s emerging and talented female artists. Their focus is on the female form, indulging in a sort of meditation on the passage of nature’s cycle, temporal flow and regeneration.

The images are at once macabre and degenerate, generative and sensuous, as well as opulent and awe-inspiring. Within them, they carry the vulnerability of decay and the vitality of the living.

There is also a set of small works based on the video that reinforce the feminine position. Explaining the basis of the series on view at the New Delhi-based Palette Art Gallery, writer Deeksha Nath notes in an essay: “Julia Kristeva has written that with the beginning of motherhood, she becomes passionate about herself. This passion for self manifests in an inward ‘looking’ that is a turning away from the outside stimulants of man-lover-world towards the growing fetus-baby-child.

"Motherhood is in some ways outside of the woman’s control; it’s characterized by instability, it happens to the organism not the subject (that is the ‘self-aware thinking person’): it happens but I’m not there. It is the unspoken, almost unimaginable that allows me to view the Transient Hyperbloom series as quite complicated, the petals, algae, coral patterning evokes ideas of decay in its application on the facial skin.”

A video and sound installation has in its wordy monologues, austere costumes and movements, dramatic lighting, pregnant silences and meaningful gazes a sort of cross between Greek tragedy), Rembrandt’s paintings, instances from the extensive visual tradition, especially European, of women as muse and the visual gestures and evocative translations of mime.

The piece of work is choppy and disturbing, because in that immersive space surrounded by the three screens, multiple audios and populated by the histories, memories, stories, vulnerabilities and desires of so many unknown women the viewer becomes the one watched and observed.

It forces you to confront your own anxieties but robs you of the language with which to articulate a personal narrative because the words attack you, enter you and take over your own voice, the critic-writer observes. What does it feel like, to have no voice? Can you hear your thoughts amidst the cacophony? What does it feel like to be a vessel, a channel? What does it feel like to experience uncontrollable change? What does it feel like to be consistently human? These are the questions to ponder over for us...