Indian artist Pushpamala N. is well-known for her witty, iconoclastic tableaux that question history and cultural memory. She uses performance, photography and video to create the elaborate masquerades in which she plays various roles. In her first solo show in Dubai, the artist is presenting two tableaux-based installations, “Avega — The Passion” and “The Arrival of Vasco da Gama”. The works are based on ancient Indian mythology and Indian colonial history, but they address universal and timeless issues about the archetypal depiction of female figures, and the fabrication of history.
“Avega — The Passion” draws on the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, which tells the story of warrior prince Rama, who is banished from his kingdom due to the machinations of his stepmother Kaikeyi. Rama’s wife Sita and brother Lakshmana accompany him into the forest during his 14-year exile. There the demoness Surpanakha, who is the guardian of the forest, tries to seduce the two princes by taking a human form. Angered by her behaviour, Lakshmana cuts off her nose and ears. To avenge this humiliation the demoness incites her brother, the powerful demon king Ravana, to abduct Sita. This leads to a great war, where Rama kills Ravana and defeats the demon army to fulfil his destiny.
Although the story focuses on the male heroes and villains, Pushpamala chose to explore the three female characters of Kaikeyi, Sita and Surpanakha in this 2012 project. She has staged significant incidents from their stories with elaborate painted sets, costumes and lighting to create powerful atmospheres and presents photographs and videos documenting the performances.
“These three women played crucial roles in the story, and like the men, they are powerful, passionate characters struggling with contradictions, desires and doubts. One is depicted as a heroine and the other two as vamps, but they are all victims of destiny. I focused on these women because I see them as archetypal characters in an archetypal story,” the artist says.
Pushpamala tells Kaikeyi’s story through a set of six sepia photographs, titled “Intrigue”. She plays the role of the warrior queen, who gets influenced by her hunch-backed wet nurse to force the king to banish Rama from the kingdom, and put her own son on the throne. The palace intrigues are portrayed in elaborate tableaux, with sets, costumes and gestures reminiscent of early travelling theatre companies in India and movies from the silent era. The interesting, anachronistic mix of elements such as Victorian furniture, a modern chessboard, an antique gramophone, a leopard skin rug, peacock feathers and many other tiny details results in richly layered hybrid images filled with high drama and subtle humour.
“Kaikeyi was an intelligent and powerful woman. She was trained in warfare, and as the king’s charioteer in a battle she had saved his life. She was the king’s favourite wife, but was misled by her wet nurse, who played on her insecurities, and ended up as a pathetic figure,” Pushpamala says.
The artist has used a black-and-white video installation, titled “Seduction”, made in the style of early cinema and animation to depict Surpanakha’s humiliation. And the episode of Sita’s abduction by Ravana is depicted through a series of nine colour photographs that reference dark symbolist imagery in Hollywood films, the sensuous women in Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings, Orientalist images of the odalisque, and classical Western paintings such as Poussin’s “The Rape of the Sabine Women” and “The Nightmare” by Fuseli. A fog machine has been used to create a dreamy atmosphere in these images.
Also part of the project is a stop motion video, created from still images of the demon chasing the princess, titled “The Hunt”, which plays in a loop conveying the feeling of a fragment from a recurring nightmare.
Each work in this installation invites viewers to go beyond the stereotypical depiction of women in literature, art and the performing arts and to look at them as multi-faceted personalities struggling with their own inner conflicts, dreams and insecurities in a man’s world.
“The Arrival of Vasco da Gama”, commissioned by the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2014, is a photographic recreation that deconstructs an 1898 Orientalist painting by Portuguese artist Jose Veloso Salgado, which depicts Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s first meeting with the Zamorin of Calicut after his arrival in India.
Pushpamala has recreated the original painting as a photographic tableau, where she plays her first male role of the navigator, with her artist friends as the supporting cast. The installation includes the photograph, printed on canvas; some of the painted sets and props made for the shoot; a series of images documenting the transformation of the artist into da Gama; and a photograph of the cast rehearsing the enactment in their everyday clothes.
By revealing every aspect of the construction of the painting, Pushpamala effectively deconstructs the fabricated narrative, returning a work of imagination that has become accepted as history, to the space of fiction and masquerade.
The installation also includes a blackboard and an antique desk with the drawers filled with cinnamon and pepper. The words written on the blackboard, and the papers on the desk provide information about topics such as the advances in mathematics, astronomy and navigation in ancient India, the history of the spice trade from India, and the widespread protests in India at the Portuguese government’s plans to celebrate the 500th anniversary of da Gama’s arrival.
“Having discovered a direct sea route to India from Europe, da Gama disembarked on the shores of Calicut in May 1498. His meeting with the Zamorin to wrestle trading privileges was unsuccessful because the ruler was unimpressed by the goods da Gama brought and refused to conclude a trading pact with him. But the painting, created 400 years after the actual event, celebrates da Gama’s arrival in Calicut. It depicts him addressing the Zamorin’s court as a nobly attired European visitor surrounded by the imagined decadence of an oriental court.
“The setting reflects Western Europe’s conception, continuing well into the 20th century, of the savagery of medieval non-European societies as those ruled by despotic kings and awaiting Europe’s civilising touch. This painting is supposed to be historical, but I have taken apart this mythologised incident of the arrival of da Gama at the Zamorin’s court and shown that it is an artifice.
“The words on the blackboard and the research materials on the desk indicate that Europeans did not know how to navigate the open seas and da Gama actually used an Indian navigator to guide him; that the spice trade in India began in 3000BC, long before the arrival of da Gama, and rather than coming with the knowledge as they claim, Europeans actually used knowledge that originated in India almost a century ago to reach Indian shores,” Pushpamala says.
“Avega — The Passion” and “The Arrival of Vasco da Gama” will run at 1x1 Gallery, Alserkal Avenue, until February 28.
