writing on Surekha, Art concerns.com,april1 2007

Communing with Urban Heroines

Rollie Mukherjee and V. Divakar, Bangalore based art critic duo looks at the latest video works of Surekha and articulates the concerns of artist while testifying them with their critical knowledge. These videos were recently shows at Goethe Institute Max Muller Bhavan, Bangalore.

The ever changing metropolis constantly demands the inhabitants to cope up with its amalgam of contesting definitions. Each individual in turn tries to negotiate with these urban phenomena through the frames and structures they see and inhabit. The recent show “communing with the urban heroines: a culture specific visual project” by Surekha can been seen as an attempt to negotiate with the identity of the upwardly mobile middle class women.

The exhibition touches upon the manifold demands of urbanity, its effects and also her varied concerns as a ‘female’- a volatile highly reflexive signifier. This comes through her representations of stereotype, alienation, escape and the socially negotiated identity of the female subject. She also intertwines personal with social/political by bringing the autobiographical. Thus tends to universalize the specific (class). Her use of metaphors flexibly shifts from one theme to another. The natural elements like fire, water and earth are the key tropes. She contextualizes myth/folklore in a urban (middle class) space where her body becomes a important signifier.

Janaki – Between fire and sky (diptych), 1.28 mins

This work though doesn’t bring in the sinister image of death in a loud voice rather pinches at the sensory level about the crudity of our existence. It evokes both psychic distress and serenity inducing a sense of burden and relief simultaneously.

Aestheticization veils the physical signs of morality/ decay. It interplays the familiar with that of fabulous. The metaphor of infinity is erected vertically against death and endlessness reduplication it invokes silence by measureless-ness of death. Thus her notion of death is based on the culturally constructed notion of mortality and resurrection. She uses the aesthetic of subtlety.

Again and again defying time and gravity

The 2 minutes long video brings a two way narrative of the textual/verbal and the visual. This makes the work intriguing because the textual message is more referential i.e. it has to rely on memory images which are indirect medium of the mind. The viewer is allowed to create the narrative in between the visual and the verbal references. This enables her to connect the most concrete with the abstract without abandoning the concrete presence. The narrative is how there is always the defying and the accepting traditions within the feminine and which is free and which is imitative of the structure and is passive.

Three fragmented actions of silence

The first video shows a woman creating a rose flower out of the petals stored in her mouth. This is cobbled with a negative image doing the reversal. It is followed by the video titled ‘red river/ blue river’. The lines on the palms are rendered in blue and red layers. Slowly the palm throbs and creates forms which look sometime familiar and at times abstract. The third video uses her own image which is superimposed by frequently popping images from popular culture which enhances the tension between signifier and the signified. These works operate in-between the biological and social realms and overlaps one realm over the other. This reminds one of Julia Kristeva’s “new melodies of the soul” which describes the drive as “a pivot between soma and psyche, between biology and representation”. By juxtaposing shots contradictory to each other she evokes emotional and distracting ambience of modern metropolis. Her aesthetic is one of subtlety.

The boiling concept/ burning concept

Both these videos are placed face to face one showing a superwoman in a domestic space making tea and the other show her burning out on a treadmill/gym. What should one take these images as? Are they mockery or are they the documents of the urban heroine’s routine to become a super woman? The middle class women dilemma of assuming the identity which is the admixture of patriarchal definitions of tradition and also modern women is overtly visible. The question passes through without taking a position which is at a dialectical relationship with the masculine definitions of tradition and modernity.

Bhagiyarathi bringing water

Bhagirathi a folk character derived from Kannada folk story "Kerege Harra" offering to the lake in which a woman is sacrificed.
Here she re-contextualizes the folklore with the contemporary social context of murder and suicide. Death is here aestheticized. The sub-text of pain/decay is shrouded by fascinating visual. The same strategy operates in the flower for the kitchen where the flowers are kept neglected at the corners of the kitchens. There is something strange and familiar at same time. The fairy tale's usual ending "happily ever after" is problematised. In 'Bhagirathi….' there is a disjuncture between the visual language/ performance and the audio description of the folklore.

Janaki.. / A strange moment of stillness/ Making home

In this neither the overwhelming might of the nature nor its sublimity that is invoked. As we know sublimity upsets the balance of nature and art to make nature preeminent. Here she brings the vulnerability and fragility and nature as all embracing and identifies it with the feminine. As the environmental experience is not exclusively visual it also invokes sensory modalities. Environment is thus not interpreted as a material surrounding but a socio- physical context in which we participate.

Her performance videos shows her own body as raw material emphasizing the author as both subject/ object of pronouncement and incorporating personal experience for public dialogue.

There is a preference for a confessional instructive didactic realism, but this shows how language becomes a tool to talk about political and problematize the larger dominant orders but at the same time it can be slippery, ending up privileging one over the other,. We know feminism supposes that art doesn’t speak for everyone and that it privileges some kind of speaker over the other. But as we also know that there can be no single feminist aesthetic because women belong to different socially stratified structures and different aesthetic preferences and vocabulary of interpretation, neither there can be a universal definition of urban heroines and their experiences cannot be the same.

What one can attempt is to undo the fixed binaries that define feminine. Practically one need to relocate oneself and interrogate the complex systematic diversified terrain of caste/class/gender thereby using medium culturally as a instrument to define social practices.