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Signs of resistance
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Reena Saini Kallat's series of paintings, recently exhibited at the Sakshi Gallery, Bangalore, can be interpreted as a conversation between the visualities of fate and faith. But as an artist, her primary concern is in the status of the symbol in a charged political environment, says NANCY ADAJANIA.
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"Braiding the Line", 2002, acrylic and cement primer on canvas.
TRAINED as a painter, the young Bombay-based artist Reena Saini comfortably straddles the worlds of painting, installation and public art. One of her major concerns is the way in which the symbolic economy of hopes, wishes, aspirations and desires is manufactured and disseminated in Indian public culture, in an ongoing play between what individuals want and what institutions or their socially programmed destinies allow them. In an unfolding body of installations, for instance, she has morphed a sand-filled uterus into an ocean of desires, while using dismembered wax body-parts as reminders of the lack that afflicts the body politic. Moving between the intimacy of the body and the public nature of political space, Saini's art-works act as sites where disease and benediction, trauma and grace compete for dominance.
Following from this, I would interpret Saini's recent series of paintings, which was exhibited at the Sakshi Gallery, Bangalore, till yesterday, as a conversation between the visualities of fate and faith. The tension between these two interrelated concepts has been dramatised most strongly in the Indian public sphere after independence. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the citizens of post-colonial India harboured the hope that they could erase the lines of fate (inheritance by birth, caste, religion and regional location) and replace them with the power of faith in the secular icons of Progress, Technology and the Nation-state. However, by the 1990s, various political and economic upheavals produced a new political configuration, under which this secular faith was eroded and substituted with a fate determined by religion and ethnicity, and articulated through processes of exclusion and discrimination.
Two visual tropes, those of the hand and the flag, recur in Saini's works. The hand appears both as a delta of fate-lines as well as an instrument of labour that could overcome those lines. The tricolour is portrayed as a mnemonic of the country, which once stood for sacrifice, peace and fertility, and also as a country today fragmented by divisive political and religious forces. In the paintings, the flag assumes various forms, floating across and tri-colouring a range of symbolic objects that stand for the country. It hues a diseased branch operated on a surgeon's table, dyes a nation-tree thirsting for water, and tints the landscape across which a dhobi carries his bundle of soiled clothes.
In "Braiding the Line", Saini tries to reclaim the tricolour from fossil ceremonialism. Instead of an avaricious politician, she chooses a subaltern figure, a fisherman to weave a tricolour with his robust hands: elephants and peacocks, Gandhiji, Maulana Azad and Vinoba Bhave are held together in this net of succulent vines. The most intriguing detail in this painting is a large watch on the fisherman's wrist, counterposed with Kalki, the 10th and future avatar of the god Vishnu (the preserver of cosmic order and righteousness), which is placed as a pictorial notation in the corner of the painting. This icon with a white horse's head, which looks like a folkloric toy stands for a utopian future where disorder will be replaced with order. Saini knits this narrative with a poetics of time. Three layers of temporality co-exist in this triptych: chronological time symbolised by the watch, natural time reflected by the flora and fauna in the net, and mythological time by the popular political and social icons of the past, the whole dominated by the cosmic and cyclical scheme represented by the avatar of Kalki.
The artist's formal treatment complements her construction of contemporary mythologies. She uses decoration deliberately, as a contextual strategy and artistic choice to compose her pictorial space. Here, decoration does not remain mere surface ornamentation, but becomes an integral part of the image-making vocabulary. For example, the net of vines, which is the central image of "Braiding the Line", forms an arabesque. On examination, it reveals a coded significance, uniting the worlds of animals, birds, humans and demigods, proposing itself as an image of the universe. Also, the underlayer of cement primer makes the ochre-gold acrylic surface look gritty and holds the tendency towards the decorative in counterpoint. Thus, Saini's critical approach saves the paintings from looking like a simulacrum of kitsch. She manages to avoid this danger by rendering some of her forms with intentional crudity and even defacing them, so that, in her hands, kitsch becomes an active ingredient and not merely a fashionable form that appeals to current taste in the art world.
Reena Saini Kallat
Another strategy which Saini employs successfully is that of jumbling seemingly different contexts, as in "Pulse 30", where folkloric representations of the Dasha-avatar iconography (the 10 avatars of Vishnu) are commingled with images from natural history and also with various portrayals of subaltern occupational types. This is an unexpected move, because we can establish a correspondence between the pattern of the incarnations and the graph of the evolution of life on earth (consider, for example, the parallel between the Matsya-avatar, Vishnu as Cosmic Fish, and the image of aquatic species). But there is no such easy correspondence between subaltern artisans such as the knife-grinder and the carpenter, and their neighbour in Saini's grid, Vishnu as the prince Rama. There is a certain friction between the images at these points.
This device of jumbling the iconic with the subaltern echoes a cultural phenomenon that we could call the haphazard democracy of street culture, where heroes of all kinds, film actors and actresses, politicians, gods, goddesses and pop gurus co-exist. The difference is that Saini introduces the excluded and marginalised inhabitant of the street, the itinerant artisan or the daily-wage labourer, into the picture. By adding the subaltern artisans to this pantheon of heroes, Saini produces a new democratic order, one in which the artisan is elevated to iconic status and portrayed with the same kind of valency as the god-king. But we are not allowed to forget that the discriminating powers of fate still operate. We find that this work of 30 small-sized paintings is framed by the images of two open palms, their fate-lines pulsating like naked wounds. And yet are these not the hands that can make a revolution?
Appropriately, on looking closer, we find that the images of the subaltern heroes are framed by candles. And although the figures look layered and even blurred at times, they exert a compelling presence. Saini surrounds their defaced bodies with a halo, provoking a dialogue between the ordinary and the auratic. The carpenter is made to look like a saint with a liquid yellow halo and the avatar of Parashuram, the fierce axe-warrior, is domesticated, given the look of an everyday guardian deity of the household.
I would suggest that as an artist, Saini's primary concern is in the status of the symbol in a charged political environment, where it is the discourse of the symbol rather than the discourse of the text that determines the fate of individuals, parties and ideologies. She draws our attention to the manufactured nature of these symbols by exposing their machinery, through her representation of the differentiated forms of the female body, the country and the competing narratives of cosmic order and chaos. Thus, in Saini's works, the symbol does not appear as an instrument of false consciousness, but instead, is unmasked as a key device in the dominant narratives of power/knowledge. It appears, from her work, that she has tried to propose a counter-symbology to the symbolic transactions of mountebanks, self-styled religious gurus and criminalised politicians who grapple for control over India's public sphere today. The forces ranged against an individual artist's project such as this one are vast, but Reena Saini is determined to keep a window of awareness open. The impulse of her work will surely achieve its full maturity in the years to come.
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