Women Are Not From Venus – Yasra Daud Khoker
women angered by the blatant use of the woman’s body, arguing to see it replaced
by a man’s body. The images have slowly been erased, scratched, in part preserved
and integrated with the writing on the wall. Through many conversations, visible
alterations and additions to the work, censorship of body parts, all these things have
been indicators of how ordinary people have ‘viewed’ these figures. The notion of
‘art’ being least on their minds, I had to tread between questions of who I was and
what I was doing, and what did this all mean? The shift in my own understanding
is entirely due to the dislocation and relocation of the works. Between this space
of the private and public, the body becomes a ‘site’ for inscription- a site in which
it gained new meaning to hold notions of the symbolic and the physical. I feel the
Henna Hands site the body between the personal, the social and the ritualistic.
This is an ongoing project, which I feel reclaims public space and opens the city
for direct artistic intervention. The element of adornment covers the whole body
in Henna Hands. The skin or ‘Jaal’ offers connotations of a control that silences. At
one level this work merged the idea of seduction and simultaneously turned it into
a symbol of subjugation, a sort of ‘sold’ stamp, as we see on the bride’s hand. Desire
and submission simultaneously resonate and contradict as the eye is focused on the
pattern and the body that surfaces out of it.”
For another series of work, inspiration came in the form of a play titled ‘Chaadar
aur Chaar Diwaari’ (Chador and four walls), created by renowned Classical dancer
Sheema Kirmani, which was about a woman whose life is limited within the walls
of her house. Three words in the play resonated with Khan – “Tayyaar, Intazaar,
Khaamosh” (Anticipate, In waiting, Silence) – which formed an independent thought
in her mind. To her, the words were reminiscent of subjugation and stillness before