A Review of the solo show ‘Shedding the Skin’ by Surekha Sharada, at Gallery Sumukha, Bangalore, 24^th June–22nd July 2023

“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophies.”

Friedrich Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The existentialist philosopher emphasizes the body as a self-aware unit akin to the mind, unlike philosophy’s inclinations to ignore the body till the 19th C. The idea of the body has penetrated into the arts, often as self-reflective, sensorial, and with a euphoric and scholarly acquaintance with a conflicted sense of gender, for half a century. Visual arts have been constantly venturing to bridge ‘history’s laxity towards somatic experiences and expressions. As a result, the concept of ‘body’ is stretched from visual to performative and palpable, from occult to aesthetic, philosophical to medical anatomies, from fragments of body with cultural, sacred and profane binaries, to the political, and the embodied. Shedding the Skin is an evocative juxtaposition to address the body conceived, constructed and cultivated through cultural sensibilities.

The show is a self-curated compilation and a peep into the larger oeuvre of Surekha’s works. As we enter the show, there is a sense of tactility that comes from the wide range of non-art materials (as opposed to the academic ethos of artistic materials) that have been deployed, like the fabrics, woven ropes, threads, photographs, etc., in one glance, reminding of almost a domestic ambience. Often clothes and accessories are considered modifications and, moreover, non-verbal communication, which evokes effortless semiotics. Selving a Body consists of two series of works; one with framed blouses made of rice paper, rusty red pigments, and superimposed woodblock images and embroidery with red threads and the other, a set of photographic performances where such garments are draped on a female torso. These works naturally bring in gendered readings to a trained eye, and while being able to view it as a cartography of biological events and other bodily experiences of women’s existence, it also unravels (shedding) as its layered swaddling complexities.

Surekha combines three different aspects frequently connected to women’s life in this: (i) rice paper, embroidery and wood block print. Blouse here works as an extension of body and identity for which she brings in post-colonial references (excerpt from the book The Indian Post Colonial) of how the introduction of the blouse was perceived within the households in 20th century Kerala. As rightly phrased in sartorial terms ‘dress-code’, the blouse was once a reminder of a taboo and later of caste and class hierarchies. The works also give a feel of cave art bringing in the ambiguity of gaze and idea of covering of body in the prehistoric times. Moving from the phase one to phase two of this work (the garment on the torso), the work seems to merge in and expand with the skin of the wearer. The body is a cultural fact just like a worn garment. The garment is also often perceived as an extension of the body. When it is worn, it evokes superimposition of bodies (body as seen by others as opposed to the experienced) and therefore comes the Baudrillardian question of which of these is her second home and whether she inhabits the body or her dress.

Not to be Seen, Threading of Threads and Fragrance of Jasmine, though a different series, are largely associated with each other on various levels. Threading of Threads consists of a semi-transparent white fabric with fake Jasmines fixed into the tiny, stitched pockets and sewed with red threads, and the needle is left as it is. Not to be Seen was a performance by the artist walking across the streets, monuments and statuettes in Mysore wearing a jasmine cloak and Fragrance of Jasmine is a series of old studio photographs of women with braided hair and jasmine. Jasmine with its white petals and enchanting fragrance has been a symbol of grace, amour, purity, and serenity in the Indian cultural context.

The fake jasmines, devoid of fragrance, placed in the tiny pouches on the periphery of the rectangular cloth evoke a cultural aesthetic constant/fixed external shell, and it contrasts with the centre with numerous superimposed and diverging red threads and needles, which seems like a metaphor of continuum, probably a continuum of biological and undefined psychological existence as a woman.

The photographed performance is Not to be seen as associated with the artist’s memories of the famous Mysore Mallige. It brings in a diversion from the above, as she is cloaked with real jasmine flowers. Jasmine’s association with grace, tenderness, and its olfactory charm contrasts with the qualities of the palace, forts and statuettes, which are callous and monumental. It recalls the three kinds of binaries: (i) the feminine masculine, due to its materials; (ii) grandeur and humbleness; (iii) while the built structures are part of written mainstream immutable histories, jasmine with its impermanency and transitional cultural contexts seems to be part of alternative oral traditions or cultural subaltern.

Fragrance, which is an abstract experience (without a solid way to describe it), seems to have a sculptural attitude here/fragrance in sculptural form. Flowers have been a figurative expression of the feminine in most cultures which almost puts women’s individuality at stake for a larger sense of universal beauty; to illustrate the ancient classical scriptures by men, who associated all body parts of women to the lotus to stage the ideal beauty; here the jasmine cloak seems like a subaltern resistance. However, in the context of this work, along with the ambiguity of an identity, it induces a liminality of whether the performative expression anatomizes flower or de anatomizes the human body.

Fragrance of Flowers indicates five stages of womanhood, from childhood to maternity. These were taken back in the olden days (a new fantasy then), young girls and women decked up in skirts and traditional silk sarees and braided long hair with a bunch of jasmine and other hair accessories were staged with props, mirrors, and furniture in studios. It indicates the double-layered cultural memory; a sense of womanhood that became corporeal through Ravi Varma imageries and the relative residues of a lived culture. This makes it double-archived through a rather new medium. While in one go all the photographs might look similar, a close-up helps in the interesting details and anomalies – like the girl in casual t-shirt and trousers retaining the braid and jasmine, the little boys dressed up as girls (innocently gender fluid) and a lot of confused gazes as they are not sure whom they are encountering. Cloth is an expression of lived culture, here clothing seems more like costuming; an inevitable irony of staging through what we realize as the vestiges of cultural extensions of which photography is a major instrument. This brings in a carefully coded feminine in the photos with jasmine as a binding agent; by now both real and synthetic flowers were used, which are devoid of fragrance and death. Now the idea of love, grace and serenity is suspended between the real ephemeral and false jasmines of eternity. Surekha also brings in a divergence in the idea of flowers by using paper red poppies on a transparent white fabric in They Grow Everywhere, narrating poppies’ mysterious relation with World War. While jasmine is associated with happiness and serenity, red poppies are a symbol of valour, sacrifice, and pain.

The work Eye of a Needle, with its white and red translucent fabric and tiny cotton buds stitched along has a shape that reminds of things like braids with flowers, back bone, and the menstrual cycle. The works titled The Knot, The Veil, Hangers, and The Shield work as broader explorations and negotiations into the semiotics of the body beyond anatomical entity to a nature of embodiment. These works consist of mould and cast of vertebral bones with resin along with knots (braids) of threads and ropes that seem like growing, bending, and taking shapes, infinitely. The Knot (installation), which looks like an enormously elongated spinal cord entwined and disassembled, feels like infinitely growing and falling off as a reminder of women as the backbone of society and their unattended pain and subversion over centuries. The casted fragments of vertebra look ornamental and floral in the case of The Shield yet evoke thoughts on sensuality and protection at the same time due to the unusual sensorial dilemma it creates with the softness of the flower and firm nature of bones.

Surekha’s works bring together (rather knit together) the sense of visuality, tactility and narratives through a network of articulations, material exploration and tracing the determinant cultural complexities of gendered existence. Along with the somatic turn (coined by Bryan Turner) she negotiates with sartorial sensibilities (dress as an embodied practice) that determine caste, class and gender mobility and yet retains the ambiguity of vertical and horizontal mobility within societies (to illustrate, the understanding of who wants to imitate whose clothing/cultural materials and for what). These works display a keen interest in aesthetics of texture and craft taking it from visual to the tangible and corporeal. Most works bind with notions of sewing, braiding, weaving, and knitting which are aesthetic as well as associated with the domestic and feminine. However, with the growing cultural and socio-political drifts, raise questions of artistic sensibilities on women’s autonomy and anatomy. This can bring in pivotal discourses about the woman who inhabits her body and whether one should limit to humble and sanguine tools of resistance or gain an active agency of empowerment. Nevertheless, these works bring in various liminality of perceiving body as both insider inhabitant and outsider which leaves possibilities of larger discourses shifting from the local to the global.

Surekha Sharada is a contemporary visual artist based in Bangalore. Her works have been exhibited in various national and international museums like San Jose Museum (USA), Museum Guimet (Paris), Kunst Kreuzberg (Germany) Kunstraum Museum (Bern), Devi Foundation/Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (New Delhi) and many more. Her works investigate how visuality can engage with gender, ecology and socio-political aesthetics negotiating public and private spaces. She has worked with photography, video archives, installations, and performance for the last three decades.