Indian artist Poonam Jain explores the notion of Utopia and the futile human quest for perfection in her first solo show in Dubai, “Graveyards of Utopia”, curated by Clarke House Initiative. Through her drawings, photographs, sculptures and installations, the artist examines the systems and structures that shape our beliefs and perceptions. She traces the connection between the personal struggle of every individual and the larger fabric of the community, offering hope that reviewing our beliefs and ideas with an open mind can lead to a better society.
“Human beings always strive to attain perfection and seek the infinite despite knowing that these attempts are bound to fail. Each of my imperfect works represents a graveyard of Utopia. But after every failure I sweep off the dust and start afresh on this eternal search,” the artist says.
Jain is interested in architectural spaces. Since her father owns a stationery shop, she also has an abiding love for books and words, which she views as mental spaces. There is a constant interplay of these two spaces in her work. For this show, she has turned the gallery into a book with page and chapter numbers stencilled on each wall. And she is presenting books as houses with door handles on the cover and the pages functioning as walls.
“Religion and science play a key role in shaping our notions of perfection and infinity, and this learning begins at home and from books. I want to examine and analyse everything I have imbibed in these physical and mental spaces so that I can try to understand and question the ideas, beliefs and perceptions that I have built up in my mind,” Jain says.
In some works she challenges the solidity, precision and function of architectural spaces by building her own imperfect structures. In “Floating City” she does without the usual 90-degree angles of rooms in an installation made from earbuds. The organic molecule-like structure of empty spaces, mounted on a wall, alludes to the interconnections between individuals and their imperfections in a flawed society. “The earbuds, which are personal-grooming tools, are symbols of our desire to clean the settling dust of our failed attempts and continue the unattainable search for perfection,” Jain says.
The same symbolism is seen in a city created with erasers. The artist has cut out a tiny piece from each eraser to make it look like the door of a house. Similar doors are also seen on the letters in a text-based work “House of Feathers”. “I see each letter as a building and each paragraph as a community. The letters are composed of tiny hand-drawn feathers to indicate the fragility of seemingly solid structures and ideas. It is important to enter these doors and re-examine our preconceived notions and behaviour patterns, and to shed the weight of our fears to become as light as a feather and fly,” she says.
The artist revisits her earliest lessons in the alphabet and words in “Letter to Me”. Here, the plaster of Paris objects arranged on a wall represent different letters making up the words of a poem written by her. By inviting viewers to decipher this coded language, she also urges them to think about the verbal, visual and ritualistic codes through which we learn and communicate concepts and ideas. She also questions learnt ways in another series of drawings, where hand gestures morph into various tools of construction and destruction. “Human beings were able to dominate the planet because of our ability to make tools. But we have misused this power and destroyed nature. We need to pause and think about what we are learning,” she says.
In “Small Worlds” the artist has tried to demolish the idea of a narrative by arranging sentences from her diary in criss-cross patterns. While viewers connect with different bits of the text to create their own stories, the artist herself proceeds to note every appearance of different letters in the text. “Removing any one letter from the text will make it meaningless. Similarly, every individual is important in the seemingly chaotic structure of a community,” she says.
In another set of works, Jain transforms books into houses with door handles on the covers. But these “houses” are placed on swings, allowing them to move when pushed. Each book and “house” tells a different story. One of the books, named after her father’s store, features pictures of the store. “My father’s life is quite stationary because he spends most of his time at the stationery store. But through this book, he travels with me wherever I go,” says Jain, perhaps alluding to how travel has opened her mind. In another book, she has listed all the words from the dictionary that she knows to present a self-portrait of sorts. One of the books is made from garbage bags, showing that the garbage collected from a house tells many stories about the lifestyle and attitude of those who live in it. And by changing the straight lines in a notebook to circular ones, the artist considers an alternative way of learning.
“The process of creating these works has helped me to learn a lot about myself, to conquer my fears and to open my mind to new ideas,” Jain says.
Jyoti Kalsi is an arts enthusiast based in Dubai.
“Graveyards of Utopia” will run at 1x1 Gallery, Al Quoz, until October 24.
