Pushpamala N: Role Of Media In The Re-imagined Cultural Milieu
– Saraswathy K Bhattathiri

Pushpamala is a Bangalore based photo performance artist extensively working on themes around representation and gendered identities from 1990s. With a degree in sculpture and practice in curation she brings in theoretic aptitude into her visual art practice. she incorporates elements from film stills, colonial postcards, paintings, and photographs. her works inculcate experiments with medium and semiotic readings of narratives with a witty take on them.


Photo performance traces back its historic origin through various movements in the west like Futurism, dadaism, action Painting, happenings etc. the notion of the performative was introduced into linguistic theory by British philosopher John langshaw austin in 1955 in his lecture series “how to do things with Words” (alludes to ideas of embodiment and enactment in visual art) due to the slippery nature of the word Performance as denoting to both contemporary performances and the performing arts like dance and theatre. the general anatomy and contents of photo-performance can be seen as inspired by both activism and theatre. Its origin takes place around the 60s and 70s when counter discourses on photographic illusionism in art was at its peak with theoretic notions that triggered visual arts to deconstruct the existing streams of representation. In the 1990s, Indian artists adapted to this media with a paradigm shift in artistic process and perspectives thereby developing a new visual culture which is inclined towards visual epistemology.