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Self-portraits by `photoshop'
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The creative trigger for Vidya Kamat's recent, and first, solo show at the Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai, was an inevitable physiological reality — PMS. NANCY ADAJANIA looks at what those haunting black and yellow images were all about.
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"Footnote to Inanna" ... a reference point.
VIDYA KAMAT'S self-portraits, exhibited recently at the Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai, cast a spell on us: hanging on the gallery walls like advertisements sign-posting a road that is going out-of-focus, these haunting black and yellow images melt and slowly pool in our irises. This is not a fanciful analogy. Kamat's digitally modified photographs are printed on vinyl, the same material on which advertisements are printed today, and displayed like posters. While the artist transgresses the expected gallery reflexes by presenting her images on a mass-cultural material like vinyl, rather than screen-printing them (this is a longer, expensive and more laborious process), she also prepares us for another strategy, which lies at the heart of this show. "The Catalogue", as Kamat titles her exhibition, refers to the display of the vinyl posters as a page-by-page simulation of images and text as they would appear in a printed catalogue. The artist playfully presents the whole show in the form of a catalogue, laying each blown-up page as an individual artwork on the walls of the gallery.
This is Kamat's first solo show, although she graduated from the Goa College of Art 20 years ago. She could not afford to self-finance an exhibition catalogue and no gallery could risk aiding an inter-media show that is not likely to be a commercial success. However, what seemed to be bad economics initially, made for a deft conceptual move eventually: the Guild, a gallery that quietly supports young and unorthodox art without fanfare, backed it. The creative trigger for Kamat's recent show is an inevitable physiological reality. Nearing 40, she found her body was performing "hormonal yo-yos": bouts of depression, mood swings, a bloated stomach, a softening of the skin tissues. This insistent and nagging presence of her body, expanding and losing its firmness in periodic cycles of aches, pushed Kamat into a specific corporeal awareness. The symptoms were simply diagnosed by her gynaecologist as PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome). Thus sanitised in medical terms, it seemed a common enough affliction among women; but its social and psychological ramifications are rarely understood. It is this space that Kamat wished to share with fellow women, as well as men who cared to see/read it. On hearing about her project, two other women, one a sociologist (Gita Chadha) and the other a poet (Arundhathi Subramaniam) made contributions, in the form of an essay and a poem, to Kamat's exhibition, of which more later.
Other women artists such as Shilpa Gupta have dealt, in recent times, with the social and religious taboos linked with the woman's body. By exhibiting soiled sanitary pads in a gallery space, Gupta has deflated the coyness associated with the anaesthetised simulations of menstrual blood that are perpetuated by the mass media and propagated by unexamined religious rituals. While this in-your-face approach is valid, Kamat's self-portrayal through spectral body fragments come across as deeper meditations on disease and healing in the context of the Indian patriarchy. The photographs of Kamat's body parts — thighs, site of desire and loss of elasticity; hands, symbol of a sexually active womb threatening to dry up; stomach, the space of hunger and satiation; head, the seat of knowledge and pain born of acute awareness — are digitally manipulated to create visual distortions.
Kamat activated the Photoshop tool box to layer the images of her body parts with febrile yellow and green patches, making them look sinister, almost unreal. Paradoxically, this has also produced the reverse effect: the distorted images look very "real" and erupt like a rash. I would stretch the limits of viewing and say that Kamat could be seen as practising an art of "sympathetic magic", which, according to the early anthropologist James Frazer, works on the principle of "like cures like". This implies that disease can be expelled by simulating its form in an object or organism external to the body, thus accomplishing a healing act. Here, Kamat performs a digital sympathetic magic. She has exteriorised her affliction by simulating it in her self-portraits through blurred grainy patches, thus ridding the body of physiological disease and social malaise.
Digitally modified images on vinyl ... an integral part of her self-expression.
Kamat uses textuality to hold the abstract nature of her visual imagery in counterpoint. This is not an extraneous factor, but an integral part of her self-expression. She chooses phrases from Chadha's essay "Talking PMS", which is part memoir, part sociological analysis of menstruation, and employs the theoretical tools of feminism and postmodernism to critique the "specific modern constructions of the female body-self, but also of modernism at large". Kamat takes a tightly cropped image of her face, where the blur of eyes and nose flowers into ovaries, and inserts Chadha's comment on the popular prejudices related to PMS in a spiral on the forehead: "To be told that `it's all in your head' is both insulting and arrogant ... " The words never appear as neat, complete constructions; they are sometimes telescoped into a skeletal distortion of the artist's arms, or blurred into liquid patches on the thighs. Kamat integrates visuality and textuality in a dynamic manner, turning words into quivering worms and toxins lurking in body parts. Kamat also imports Subramaniam's robust lines from "Tomorrow" into her images: "There are toxins enough here/to burn a crater through the page", and attempts a creative destruction of the regressive social forces and mythologies that inhibit women from celebrating their bodies and releasing their desires.
It is significant that the patterns formed by these proliferating word-toxins are arranged like body tattoos, branding the skin with the accents of prejudice, critique and ideology. Saturated yellow and green tattoos — redolent of turmeric and betel-nut leaves, colours auspicious in Indic culture — could be interpreted as ceremonial markers ruptured by years and even centuries of restrictions placed on the woman's body. Kamat pushes open a closed door from her past and a memory slips out. A child-woman, in her finery, the paste of sindhur rubbed across her forehead, she waits for her grandfather to touch her feet. This single gesture made her feel divine, a goddess incarnate. But, one day, a single stain of blood wiped this gesture away forever. Her body had "betrayed" her ("What wrong had I done?"), she could no longer play goddess; from then on, she was like any other woman, her body being prepared for the inevitable.
As a pre-pubertal girl living in a large Gaud Saraswat Brahmin family in Goa, Kamat was worshipped as Kumarika, honoured as an aspect of the deity Shanta Durga. Her period ruptured the liminal space in which she was transformed into a goddess; she no longer felt "special and immortal". This disruption made her aware of her body and its custom-bound limitations. During her research, she realised that other women had also shared similar experiences, wavering between ritual ecstasy and circumscription, denied the space to articulate themselves. Thus, her digital photographs carry the impress of her own memories as well as those of other women's: remembering is a creative form of elimination, which brings one to the threshold of new meanings.
Another way of looking at Kamat's representations of her overexposed, pitted body parts, is to return to the year 1987, when she worked as a museum curator of the anatomy section of Goa Medical College. There, as she puts it in a macabre way, she trained herself to confront the physicality of the body, "with a cake in one hand and formaldehyde in the other!" Kamat's life reads like a monologue of different women's lives performed by a single actor. For the past eight years, she has been teaching comparative mythology, a subject in which she has earned a doctorate. For over a decade, she has survived on her work as an illustrator for mainstream newspapers and has only occasionally exhibited in group shows.
Having occupied these different worlds — art school, academia and journalism — Kamat has learned to be open to competing sources and perspectives, to experiment with the form of the self-portrait. She does not want to be constricted by a narrow feminism nor does she accept the cultural burden handed to her as a woman. Consider, for instance, her decision to name the series of photographs in this exhibition as "Footnotes to Inanna". In this ancient Sumerian mother goddess, who is Queen of Heaven and Earth, Kamat finds "the earliest prototype of all women". She annotates and deepens her individual history through that of the goddess: "Feminists may see Inanna as a feminine idol in a patriarchal society, but I choose her as my reference point."
By later Babylonian times, it is true, the goddess had been domesticated as Ishtar — morning star and evening star, eternal virgin and divine harlot — but Kamat refers us further back, to the deep past of Sumer (3500-2000 B.C.). There, we find that Inanna is an extraordinary figure: queen, questor and goddess embarking on the arduous and dangerous search for the self. We appreciate Kamat for exploring the representation of the mother goddess as a cultural complex rather than as a retrospectively glossed, one-pointed feminist agenda. Kamat's sleight of hand with the acronym PMS, which she reinterprets as "post-modern space", is another example of this complexity.
The viewer is given a space where many inheritances can be reworked, including that of 20th Century feminism. The dark, visceral visuality of her works points to a road paved within the gallery; the viewers walk inside out.
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