Review

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Myths, Memory and Imagination

‘In Praise of Folly,’ solo show by Lavanya Mani was held at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai recently. Noopur Desai reviews the show.

In his classic ‘Praise of Folly’, Erasmus concluded: “All men are fools, even the pious ones. Christ himself, though he was the wisdom of the Father, took on the foolishness of humanity in order to redeem sinners. Nor did he choose to redeem them in any other way but through the folly of the cross and through ignorant, sottish disciples.” (‘In Praise of Folly’ was written in Latin by a Dutch Humanist Desiderius Erasmus in 1509. It is a prose satire written in Latin directed against theologians and church dignitaries.)

Lavanya Mani

The first impressions of this display are oddly incompatible: Lavanya Mani’s show appears both coherent and unfinished. Unfinished, because the first glimpse of the exhibition through a set of small works on the front wall seemingly make no effort to claim the exhibition space, a space that, after all, stretches over three levels and is rather generous.

One has to plunge through a massive door to enter the high roof space of Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai, which leads the viewer to a body of text on the left wall describing Lavanya’s work and creative process. The sumptuousness of this show can only be realised once the spectator steps into the next section of the gallery. So it becomes an unwavering narrative that is lined up into a carefully choreographed display gradually revealing the works one by one. And that massive wooden door turns into a metaphor for the Victorian era exemplifying the wit and irony and grief at the same time.

At first glance, her works employ colonial holograms, text, flora and fauna, animal figures, images of the coloniser ‘discovering’ India with his binoculars, mythological themes, but a deeper reading into her works reveals the issues such as Colonialism and its relation to the textile industry, its political, economic aspects and socio-cultural impact.  Lavanya’s vocabulary denotes the past references satirically evoking where the exchange between them is that of a conquest and domination.

Lavanya represents a generation of artists that deals with the complexities and ironies of our times while responding to the contemporary art and cultural practices. From her college years when she was studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.University, Baroda, she started working with various elements of textile and dyeing which included use of cotton cloth as canvas, embroidery, appliqué, and batik. In her first solo exhibition in Mumbai, she situates the medium of textile into the art practices through the contemporaneity of the traditional material like Kalamkari. Lavanya involves herself diligently in the artisanal aspect of painting through stitching, dyeing, washing, embroidering, which directly records each and every industrious act of her painterly labour. She has intentionally kept herself out of conjunction with masculinist strokes of modernist oil painting, staging one of the ways in which women artists can reposition themselves in this discourse of Indian modernism.

In ‘Scarlet Letter,’ Lavanya’s choice to work with textiles made her use the garment shape, as a motif and sculptural form rather than a functional piece of clothing, to express the complex results of colonisation. In ‘Emperor’s New Machine,’ one can see an attempt to negotiate conflicts between language, culture and history that the postcolonial world must reconcile. The conjugation of the tradition and the modern thereby leading to a third meaning came out of her works. A dimly lit room displays the central piece of the show ‘Emperor’s New Machine,’ an anthropomorphised sewing machine that becomes an allegory of political as well as psychological confrontation, allegory replacing myth on one hand and problematising the contemporary modern on the other. Here, the proscenium is turned into a plane where the performance of the colonised and the coloniser has taken place by means of body masquerading and mimicry and invites the viewer to sit on a bench in left corner of the room to experience the spectacle.

‘Signs Taken for Wonders,’ stages the archival history posed by the British through the documentation of Indian landscape. Lavanya also draws from history as well as from mythology. ‘Red Labyrinths: Ariadne’s Thread,’ depicts the objects such as anchor, scissors, lock, scale and chair lying inside a maze of Ariadne’s thread. The title borrowed from a Greek myth, means a series of found truths in a contingent where the process takes form of a mental record, a physical marking or a philosophical debate. It propounds the role of myths, memory and imagination in the construction of history and culture. She has been trying to explore these roles in the establishment of colonialism, the economics of political dominion and imperialism, and also the neo-liberal, nationalistic agendas to consume and appropriate the ‘traditional’ arts and crafts.

Most importantly, the means employed by her are the constituents of her visual language that also become part of her subject matter. For her it’s a deliberate choice of a crafts practice and its system of knowledge when she occupies the spaces of the act of dyeing, stitching and printing, signifying the creative process, thus elevating that process from craftsmanship to creative artistic process. It comments how the cotton and textile industry was hampered by the increasing complexity and productivity of the production process due to the use of ever more mechanised forms of production. But Lavanya does not stop here. She understands the dynamics of postcolonial societies that are going through a process of globalisation, emphasising the possibilities of a non-Western contemporaneity and intercultural communication. Critiquing from this point of view, she makes interventions with the use of cotton as her pictorial surface and natural dyes and appliqué as her medium. For example, in the set of six small works entitled ‘Songs of Innocence,’ manifests the landscapes with appliqué technique encountering human fantasies while posing the reality.

Annapurna Garimella has rightly observed in her note for this exhibition, “From being an examination of the foreigner who finds the Indian exotic or the native who is fascinated with the European, Lavanya’s work then become a site for reflecting on our contemporary. In a roundabout way, her textiles highlight the current, seemingly insatiable, desire for domesticating colonial heritage as well as our collective narcissistic drive to recover and consume native tradition, through biographical and other narratives and in the form of craft, even as we rush headlong into a brave, new world.”

Lavanya Mani has obtained her Master’s degree in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at M.S. University, Baroda, in 2001. A recipient of the Nasreen Mohamedi Award, she has featured in several noteworthy group exhibitions such as ‘Analytical Engine’ at Gallery Seven Art, New Delhi, and Bose Pacia, Kolkata, in 2009; ‘Meandering Membranes’ at Shrine Empire Gallery, New Delhi, in 2009; ‘Urgent: 10 ml of Contemporary Needed’ presented by the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art at Travancore Art Gallery, New Delhi in 2008; ‘Inner Vision’ at the Guild Art Gallery, New York, in 2008; and ‘in-sid-er’ at Bodhi Art, Mumbai, in 2007.

(Noopur Desai holds MVA (Art History) from Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.University, Baroda. Her research interests occupy spaces like cultural studies, history and visual arts. Currently, she is working with the Mohile Parikh Center, Mumbai as a Programme Executive. Email: noopurdes@gmail.com)