How Bengaluru artist Pushpamala N weaves cultural memory into her art

Pushpamala N (right) preparing for a performative work as Kaikeyi.

Very few Indian contemporary artists pack in wit, gender politics, social commentary and pop culture like Pushpamala N does. Through most of her artistic journey, following her art education in sculpture at the MS University, Baroda, she has placed herself at the centre of performative photography works — as actor, artist and director.  She has embodied and enacted Indian women characters who represent cultural iconography, societal demands. Phantom Lady, or Kismet (1996-98), a memorable work by her, was a take-off on superheroine Nadia. The form, too, in the way the work was given its film-noir style treatment, had inspiration in Bollywood — an example of how she can make representation not only singularly personal but also immensely fun. Similarly, all her works extend to narratives with multiples histories of the vamp, the rustic woman, the criminal, the seductress, the mother and the performer.

None of her works are dry or at a distance from the artist herself. She has said in earlier interviews that her two most important influences are KG Subramanyan and Bhupen Khakkar, both known for their wit and playfulness with irony. She is a charismatic on-camera presence. Her practice has always seemed intent on making art accessible beyond the connoisseur and collector.

Pushpamala N as Kaikeyi.

Now in her early 60s, and still working out of her home city Bengaluru, the artist returns to the form in which she formally trained herself: sculpture. Her latest series is a show titled "Documenta Indica", on display at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. This marks a departure only in form; her engagement with ideas of everyday India continues, with special emphasis this time on memory and the workings of history. Her earliest works were sculptures, mostly terracotta sculptures, through which Pushpamala created a vocabulary derived from an idea of Indianness. Even when she chose photography, her early training in sculpture was perceptible in the way she staged the iconic or the stereotypical — through all her art, the representational quality remained. “I did not leave sculpture really, I think my background as a sculptor shapes my work in any medium that I may use. I have been told that my photographic work is very sculptural, in the way I use light,” Pushpamala says. The tableau form which is very frontal, has always been of her interest while composing photographs, films and live performances. The sets for her photographic works have objects and accessories, paint and props hat she herself creates. “A friend remarked that I create a scene and place myself in the centre like a living sculpture,” she says.

She describes the new series as “a document and an archive of the present”. In 2015, she came across a vitrine holding medieval tamrashasanas or copper-plate records which developed into a set called Atlas of Rare and Lost Alphabets, the most painstaking and eloquent work at the show. She learnt and developed the technique of etching on copper sheets and colouring with patinas, then extended this to other works, like the Nara and the Blackboards series. She uses expensive and classical media like copper and bronze in a conceptual way — when the medium becomes the message. Ephemeral street slogans and banal signboards are immortalised in engraved copper. Inscrutable epigraphic texts stand like ruins of the past. Ledgers cast in bronze are shut tight so they can’t be opened. “Someone came up to me in the show and asked, is this all about hisaab-kitaab (keeping accounts)?” she says.

From the 'Blackboards' series.

Although this is a show where the artist is hardly visible, the performative aspect comes across as obvious in the processes behind the final sculpture. In the show’s most monumental work, Atlas of Rare and Lost Alphabets, made with a hundred copper plates, she has inscribed letters with an engraving tool. She engraved on copper plate all day, for three years, for this work to materialise. She made grooves on the surface of the coated plate, during which she felt the resistance and materiality of the metal. “It was very tedious work, but I love doing tedious work, it can be very meditative. I was a little confused when I started the work, I was loving it , but also wondering why I was doing this kind of artisanal practice after years of doing performance photography and video, which was more like theatre or film production. I was thinking how it connected with my recent practice, or whether I had gone off on a different track. Then I remembered the scenes from the film The Name of the Rose (1986) set in medieval Europe, where scores of monks are shown copying manuscripts in the monastery library, that is all they do, all their lives, to preserve the knowledge,” she says.

The different layers of cultural memory and to history and historical forms are constant references in her art, although she is primarily concerned with the present. When Pushpamala took part in some recent street protests, she started thinking about how she could bring contemporary issues into her work. This led to the Nara series which memorialises the protest slogans and poems.

In tone, feel and the way the works are presented to the viewer, this is Pushpamala’s most quietly eloquent show. There isn’t a trace of artistic gimmicky or staging. And yet, there are enough layers of expression and interpretation that make the works alive to the present. The present shapes the past as much as the past shapes the present. Watch the show to see and experience how Pushpamala makes this big idea, that the present is always refiguring the past, so beautifully and momentously immediate.

'Documenta Indica' is on at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, till November 26.

Two other shows that make a trip to Mumbai’s art district worthwhile this week:

'Every Bone a Song’, an exhibition of works by Biraaj Dodiya.

* 'Every Bone a Song' is a show of paintings and sculptures by 29-year-old artist Biraaj Dodiya, her second solo show and first in Mumbai, the city she was born in (to artists Atul and Anju Dodiya) and where she now lives and works. This series is a continuation of themes evident in her first solo at Experimenter, Kolkata — Dodiya’s inquiry of the body and landscape, and related thoughts on support, surface, structure and material. For Dodiya there is no landscape without ruin, she is interested in constructing this liminal space through constant layers and their erasure, replaced by newer layers.

Till December 23 at Experimenter, Colaba, Mumbai. 

Soham Gupta's new solo show 'Desi Boys’.

* After his showing at the Venice Biennale in 2019, Kolkata-based artist Soham Gupta has become a recognisable name in the art world for his works in which documentary photography, art and the written intersect. His new solo Desi Boys is about sartorial choices and grassroots hip-hop movement that have helped disenfranchised youth find outlet and a voice despite the crippling odds. The photographs are deliberately not pretty or with obvious aesthetic flourishes, but they articulate what a generation of digital natives find their voice and identity in.

Till December 2 at Sakshi Art Gallery, Colaba, Mumbai.