ART
In a state of perennial siege
NANCY ADAJANIA
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Reena Saini Kallat externalises her anxieties about the human condition, and hopes to neutralise them, by creating talismanic objects.
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"Penumbra Passage (Canine Cases)", an installation composed from painted portraits and museal cases, mimics the stance of a historical exhibit.
New calligraphy of terror: In "Rainbow of Refuse", 2005-2006, the sense organs toughen into armour.
REENA SAINI KALLAT has increasingly emerged, in her art, as a maker of talismans, a caster of protective spells. Her paintings and sculpture-installations portray the human body, and by extension the body politic, under perennial siege, wracked by mythic demons and unknown viruses that strike at it from all sides. To fend off such relentless acts of invasion, occupation and possession, Reena draws or shapes objects in the form of auspicious offerings: lush foliage, fruits, flowers. She places wishing candles on rangolis, ritual floor patterns that she shapes into uterine islands. Or she distributes threads of peace to people who will knot them into plaits of healing like the wishes knotted through a dargah's filigreed screens. Or she carves toy weapons that function more as lucky charms than as museal emblems of systemic violence. The artist's actions reveal an obsessive need to consecrate and sanctify contested sites, to ward off forces of conflict and chaos. I would say that hers is an apotropaic art: she externalises her fears and anxieties about the human condition, and hopes to contain or neutralise them, by creating talismanic objects.
Thus the emotional drive feeding her `counter-symbologies' — political symbols married to sacral imagery or traditional miniature folios — emerges, not only from grand political narratives, but from her yearning to generate an apotropaism intended to resolve conflicts of perception, location and identity at various levels.
Powers of healing
In her recent exhibition, "Rainbow of Refuse", currently on view at Bodhi Art, Mumbai, she makes an amulet of toy weapons or tattoos a contested political site with rubber stamps inscribed with the names of Indian citizens. Here, the macro-politics of structural oppression is threaded through with the intimate and particular details of being: political narratives related to forbidden utterance, political rhetoric, territoriality and aggression are sought to be controlled through the powers of healing and magic.
"Penumbra Passage (Canine Cases)", an installation composed from painted portraits and museal cases mimics the stance of a historical exhibit. Reena painted portraits of ordinary citizens sourced from the Net are framed like royalty in gilded silver. Below the portraits, a red velvet case of toy weapons is laid out like a set of canines.
You look up to find the portraits seemingly foaming at the mouth, with a smear of colour. Could this cloud of incontinence be a forbidden territory or a prohibited zone that is choking the body politic? Indeed it does have a recognisable shape: that of the contested territory of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir.
With no political solution in sight to its contested status, Kashmir continues to be ravaged by low-intensity warfare. The weapons of destruction lie in Reena's installation like relics, ruins of a freedom that is hard to achieve. They are carved into beautiful objects, their handles exquisitely ornate: precious to the touch, they caress the senses. Nevertheless they have invisible teeth. They are placed in an oval formation that represents the mouth but equally carries the menace of the vagina dentata. I would read the weapon-mouth as an amulet, a taveez made by Reena to protect herself and her fellow citizens from never-ending conflict and terror, to help them pass through the penumbral passage of a contemporary history coloured by greed, guilt and nostalgia. The trope of the contested territory re-emerges in "Penumbra", a steel cradle that is dead-cold to the touch. Made of rubber stamps bearing the names of India's citizens, the contested site lies ominously, like a dormant tumour in the cradle.
For a while now, Reena has explored the manner in which violence can be legitimised by aestheticising the tools of destruction, citing the decorative nature of primitive, colonial or postcolonial weaponry and heraldry. In "Rainbow of Refuse", 2005-2006, the sense organs toughen into armour, as demons are flung at them encased in an abstract ornamental script — demonic spells? Is this a new calligraphy of terror, undecipherable even on list-serves or by the most advanced search engines? "Birds of Steel", 2006, is a set of diptychs juxtaposing fighter planes and colonial-period Indian heraldry. As Bernard S. Cohn has demonstrated in a landmark essay "Representing Authority in Victorian India", this system of heraldry was initiated by the British in the 1870s to maintain a visible sense of hierarchy among their vassals, while also compensating in pomp for the complete absence of power that these princes could exercise. The juxtaposition between martial aircraft streaking through an ever-nocturnal sky and the symbolic code of heraldry is sharpened when we note the abstract calligraphy of demons swirling dangerously close to the coat of arms.
Armorial bearings are the codified expression of power. But how do we decipher power that remains raw and beyond the range of symbols: power that is not articulated through codes or by positions of precedence at a durbar, but manifests itself through inchoate, as yet uncodified, forms?
Reena's miniature weapons and pervasive demons reflect the nightmares of a child-woman who sits in a nursery of perennial stimulations. In this twilight zone, toys are wound up by unseen forces; they come alive like shrill warriors raised from the dead. She must cast a hex on them to seize control.
Proposing a balance
Is this evidence of something more than a horror unleashed from the unconscious? Perhaps it is. Amid this nursery of life-like toys and trip-up games lies the motif of the fragile floating home whose lock has been changed.
Reena was born to a Punjabi family that suffered the horror of the Partition that brought independent India into being. And so, at the core of her being, Reena finds the macro-political interwoven, inextricably, with the intimately personal. She has attempted to fight these demons of the mind with the powers of magic.
By scaling up a mandala, pouring sand into a rangoli, she proposes a balance between the trauma of contested political sites and genocide, and the promise of an unscarred future.
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