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Striking ‘photo performance’
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Pushpamala’s tableaux of images reflect a definite female perspective, finds SUMANASPATI
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Photo: G. Krishnaswamy
Documenting life Pushpamala was in the city recently
Pushpamala could have been a mighty popular university professor expounding on some pet theme from the dusky dense portals of feminist/post-colonial studies. Or an accomplished ‘thinking’ actress or better still an arty-splashy director e
ntrenched in the ‘other’ cinema or theatre. For that is how she does her photography -- very playfully. And talks about it!
Putting herself in there in oodles of riveting guises has been her chic method: as goddess Lakshmi of calendar art, as the blue-faced dainty yogini from centuries away Bijapur, as a curiosity Toda woman, her face pinched between measuring calipers, as Ravi Varma’s forlorn Lady in Moonlight or Returning from the Lake, as the patsy ooh-oomphy underworld vamp-dancer or reborn blazing B&W Fearless Nadia , as some bored anywhere in India housewife living cold-bodily in that funny always nightie..... Given that kind of mixed-up to boot range and dashing eclectic stab, it was inevitable her photo-realist images became -- ah, man! -- iconic. Cheeky in just a decade!
A decade ago, when she was feeling dragged with her career-as-studio-sculptor, an invitation landed on her table asking to contribute a piece for an exhibition celebrating Hundred Years of Cinema. And then it happened so trippingly: “For sheer fun I said I will be the Fearless Nadia. I admire that character, although I hadn’t seen a single film of hers!” So went she with an up and coming Meenal Agarwal in tow to an evocatively crumbling mansion in old Bandra and shot four B&W rolls: “The results were so good and I immediately thought of developing a full show around a story!”
She found her method quickly -- designing her photographs as exquisitely detailed tableaux which summon well-known - worn clichés and fuddling formulaic. That on dot ensures an instant rapport with the ‘lay’est of educated viewers. Just observe the titles of her early “photo-performance” exhibitions: Phantom Lady or Kismet, Golden Dreams or Sunhere Sapne, The Anguished Heart or Dard-e-Dil... You can drift in them.
The constant factor in Pushpamala’s work though is -- not obvious? -- the female perspective. It goes pretty wild encompassing “feminist themes, women’s stories, women’s images, narratives, women’s materials.....” The world. No wonder, her works does provide ample grist for critics and theorists to mill and mull.
From photo-thrillers to video art was a nary short leap Pushpamala has cleared with flying colours. Archival digs and memory cuts open richly decodable wide ghostly swaths in the two B&W films screened last week courtesy Alliance Francaise of Hyderabad and art-historian Rasna Bhushan’s Vidyasagar Art Centre.
Recipe Books cum housewife diaries and Indian Nation - that could be the critic’s gloss over the fantastically named Rashtriy Kheer and Desiy Salad (or National Pudding and Country Salad; 2004). Those are names of two real anthem singing tri-coloured dishes from the Fifties found in her mother’s and mother-in-law’s personal recipe books which were also freely used by husbands and children to scribble their own stuff.
The longish (35 mins) and demanding Autumn in Paris (2006) goes back to the narrative technique of her photo-suites, now afloat on a video stream. It just happened because the one-room flat in which she was staying in the heart of Paris in 2005 on an Indo-French artistes-in-residence programme happened to be the 16th century house of the probably murdered-while-pregnant Gabrielle d’Estree, the beautiful young mistress of King Henri IV of France. And because Pushpamala didn’t have access to a video-camera but found a young perspicacious French photographer Cedric young to dramatically capture the apparitions and looming violence lurking in the innards of the city.
A lot of creative editing (by the brilliant Sankalp Meshram) and form-giving post-production devices provide the sinewal structural linings to this deep shadowed sombre yet ebullient gothic thriller--murder mystery-- film-noir work. For once Pushpmala plays herself in the photographs exposing herself to the pitfalls of touristy sentimentalism and self-indulgence. But this is largely averted.
Like her photographs the two films demand repeated viewing. But you can’t complain. They yield more than you can ask for! Even if the sound system was as excruciatingly bad as it was here at a well-attended show on a fine wintry evening.
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