GARDEN OF UN-EARTHLY DELIGHTS
– Beth Citron, 2023
From the time of her MFA studies at Goldsmith’s College in London in the mid 2000s, artist Suhasini Kejriwal has created profoundly imaginative landscapes that draw on detailed observations from her daily life. Kejriwal’s rigorous practice spans painting and sculpture, and figuration and abstraction, investigating the unruliness of urban, jungle, and desert environments and the unusual juxtapositions and hybridities that mark everyday visual culture in India today. A hallmark of Kejriwal’s practice is her integration of multiple materials and densities into individual works, with paintings incorporating drawing, photography, collage, and collaboration, and large-scale sculptures adorned with hand-embroidered or intricately painted surfaces. Episodically, Kejriwal has returned to the study of natural forms and the creatures that dwell amidst them, with earlier presentations of teeming paintings and anthropomorphic totems in London and at the Anokhi Museum in Jaipur. Kejriwal uses real references to bridge organic and geometric flora and foliage, building a landscape that is transcendent in detail, color, and saturation. In this work as across her practice, Kejriwal attends to the breadth of psychological, conceptual, and even historical relationships underlying individual formal choices. For example, in this series, all of the botanicals and leaves are drawn directly from species in her own home garden, a sanctuary during the years of the covid pandemic while simultaneously a testament to the isolation and uncomfortable stillness of the period. In this sense, Kejriwal performs seriously the role of witness, not only in an adherence to what is seen and but also with the commitment to felt experience. Kejriwal has developed a particular and canny interest in the transnational history of English gardens, mapping the movement of her own work onto colonial and postcolonial histories across Britain and India. As part of the process of “taming” India and overlaying an image of home onto the subcontinent, the British brought many botanical species and designs for gardens to India (where the refined Mughal garden had reigned for several centuries). This has resulted in many new and hybrid species in urban India today, which Kejriwal comments on through evocative and sometimes psychedelic layers of images in her compositions. These works reject both the implied orientalist exoticism of the subcontinent and the propriety of the manicured English garden, especially as they are now – perhaps ironically – exported again to London in a contemporary global context. The long-term cross-pollinations and solidarities resulting from colonial histories also parallel Kejriwal’s interest in deep time, a scale of measuring the earth that extends beyond the human. While earlier versions of Kejriwal’s totemic sculptures featured embroidered surfaces and examined the relationship between hard and soft materials, this series reflects an evolution to hand-painted bronze and an enlarged scale. In this medium, the artist aligns herself with a conventional material of monumental public sculpture while also retaining her position as a painter attuned to small and fantastical forms. At the same time, and perhaps most radically, Kejriwal’s sculptures defy the figural expectation of totems, showing the enormous and indeed enduring power of nature across past and future, and the otherworldly and everyday.
WHEN THE OTHER STARES BACK: PART I
– Adwait Singh, 2022
In Everyday Extraordinary, the series from which the works here are taken, Suhasini Kejriwal examines the quotidian tableaus from Chitpur in North Kolkata and Chor Bazar in Central Mumbai. Both these geographically removed neighbourhoods have recently witnessed dramatic shifts and redevelopment. The artist started studying these areas in 2015, first as a flaneur, observing with interest their lively chaos and aleatory coincidences. Later as her investment grew, she started collaborating with collectives like Hamdasti, exhuming in the process rich histories that have been all but forgotten. Like the multitextured localities they index, the works have been composed in layers and by pulling upon a range of techniques—photographing, editing, painting, collaging, and embroidering—that are intended to slow down the process of creation to match the languorous pace at which these neighbourhoods seem to have grown. In the words of the artist the documentation of these localities is presented “not as a set of fleeting aesthetic impressions but as a deeper emotional and psychological response.”
Bhola (2019-20) is a portrait of a goat that the artist encountered in Chor Bazar. Followed by the inquisitive gaze of the animal, Kejriwal felt compelled to investigate this affinity through her lens. The photograph was subsequently printed, painted over, and each strand of fur meticulously delineated in embroidery. While Bhola’s gaze ultimately remains unreadable, Kejriwal’s portraiture of the beast is unmistakably compassionate. The encounter alerted the artist to what the American science fiction writer Ted Chiang has called “the great silence” in a take on Fermi’s paradox that has us scouting for intelligence in outer space while withholding it from the nonhumans around us. In his book The Animal That Therefore I Am (2002), the French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls out this logocentrism, or presuming human language as a prerequisite for intelligence and exceptionalism, flipping the question from whether animals can speak and reason to whether they can suffer. In this way, Derrida deconstructs the human-animal divide, linking the experience of compassion to a reflection on the finitude that we share with them. Like an embarrassed Derrida caught naked by his cat, the artist felt exposed by the abyssal gaze of this snowy beast standing against a decommissioned wall.
The attention to non-human lives continues as a leitmotif in other works from the series too. In Beadon Street (2019-20) for instance, the foreground is dominated by stray dogs and crows encountered in Chitpur. Framed by hand-painted foliage, the background proffers evidence of the continued uptake of Jatra — the folk theatre for which the district is famed. In the middle ground a man seemingly resting on his hand-drawn rickshaw, looks directly at the viewer. The sepia-tinted inertia of the composition is an attempt to pin down the feeling of routine that persists despite the ongoing encroachments and demolition. As one’s attention flits from detail to detail in the dense composition like a crow disappearing into a tree, the city reveals itself as the place where multi-species habitations and habitudes nest. The ease or unease with which these lives sit within each other, is ultimately what these works set out to investigate.
NOTE ON POETRY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
– Sumona Chakravarty, 2019
The canvas hung expectantly at Suhasini’s studio, waiting to be stretched, framed, packed and dispatched to the gallery. A black and white photograph of a hand-pulled rickshaw, the gaunt rickshaw puller taking a moments rest, collaged carefully with posters, electric cables and other visual elements that come together chaotically in the busy markets of Chitpur, Kolkata.
These elements were familiar to me, not just because I had walked with Suhasini through Chitpur as she had taken these photographs, but because these sights and sounds were common to our everyday experiences of the city. On closer observation, the canvas revealed densely embroidered patches of thread, embellishing the image and lending the ordinary image a sense of grandeur and circumstance.
Suhasini’s walks through Kolkata and Mumbai had resulted in several such collages of everyday objects, visuals and textures, embellished to imbue an element of the extraordinary.
In the conversations that followed our walk and my subsequent visit to her studio, we both wondered how her engagement with the city could linger on in the streets and public spaces, while simultaneously entering her studio and galleries; whether it would be at all possible to blur the lines between the public and the private spaces of making and experiencing an artwork.
With these questions in mind, Suhasini joined the Chitpur Local project, an initiative my organization, Hamdasti, had begun in order to connect artists to community spaces and develop collaborative projects for collective expression, dialogue and perhaps even action. Our projects were all based in the historic and diverse neighbourhoods around Chitpur Road, with 8 artists working with local students, residents, craftspeople, businesses and government officials.
Suhasini started exploring the possibilities of working with local craftspeople and we introduced her to some of our existing collaborators. Bholanath Das, the owner of a signage making studio was a natural partner. He had been involved with Hamdasti for a while, showed an active interest in collaborating, and his work also resonated with Suhasini’s interest in documenting and incorporating posters and signboards in her images of the city.
I was curious to see what would emerge from this exchange. Over and above the challenge of making work that is inspired by the streets and then takes life on the streets, I wondered if it would be also possible for Suhasini to negotiate and extend the typical artist-craftsman relationship beyond a transactional process to develop a process of co-creation.
The streets of Chitpur are seldom quiet – hand-pulled rickshaws, cycle vans, and auto rickshaws weaving between trucks, buses, cars and trams, the furious movement of goods from shops to warehouses and back, and a tangle of people and narrow winding alleys.
Amidst this chaos stood the first of a series of works – a refurbished hand-pulled rickshaw, with elegant Bengali letters enthroned in the space usually occupied by a passenger – “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, knowledge is free”, a much-loved line by Rabindranath Tagore, a national icon and the most famous resident of Chitpur Road.
Students on their way to school stopped to have a look, shopkeepers huddled around it and, with a little encouragement, discussed what they thought it meant. And, finally, rickshaw pullers, for whom the hand-pulled rickshaw is a source of pride, of sustenance and of struggle came forward to share their views.
We carried the rickshaw along the road, letting it linger in quieter corners, in front of local historic landmarks, and waited for people to engage with it and, through it, with each other. The rickshaw pullers struggled to read Bengali and recommended that Suhasini make her next object in Hindi.
Over 1 year, 3 more objects followed, created by Suhasini and produced in part by Bholanath Da, who, unfortunately, through the process, was reluctant to participate in a more creative capacity. Each work used an everyday object, found commonly in the locality, embellishing it with text, and quietly inserting it into the urban fabric, along a half-mile section of Chitpur Road for a few hours over the span of a year. Each object extended the circle of interaction, stretching across larger area of the neighbourhood, including people across languages, and integrating different aspects of the locality’s cultural history.
To me, the final object – a commercial cycle van, foiled by gleaming Hindi letters with a poem by the 15th century poet Kabir – was the fullest exploration of the idea of translating an ordinary object into something extraordinary, and, also, demonstrated the affect such a gesture can have in a public space.
While the hand-pulled rickshaw, the starting point of Suhasini’s engagement with the locality, was seemingly mundane, it was also a problematic yet much-loved symbol of Kolkata’s past. Putting a commercial cycle van alongside this symbol of nostalgia elevated this symbol of labour to an equally significant representation of the locality’s history. Using Hindi text gave the same validity to the migrant populations from other states as was given the native Bengali population. The gesture of imbuing these objects with new meaning, and placing them back within their contexts, created moments of curiosity and surprise, leading to unusual interactions.
The gesture of translating the ordinary into something out of the ordinary, and placing it back in the context, gave Suhasini the unexpected ability to layer a landscape with new meaning, to validate certain experiences or histories, and draw attention to different narratives. Through the process, I observed how Suhasini was aware of this privilege, and therefore actively and purposefully built upon the responses from people in the area while choosing what to embellish and what to leave out.
The objects returned to these streets several times, during public events like our community art festival, and also more often without occasion. With each repetition of this gesture, there grew a sense of familiarity and shared conversations about the meaning of these works, as well as the objects, texts and histories they represent. These repeated encounters allowed people living and working in these areas to develop their own associations with the objects. For some it was a welcome surprise to see it reappear on a quiet day, for others when it drew too large a crowd, an obstruction to their daily movements. For some it was something that kept engaging them with multiple interpretations each time, for others the metaphors seemed too direct. But most were happy when the objects appeared just for them, quietly, without an audience. They appreciated that the work continued to appear time and again for almost two years as if it belonged to the streets. It made repeated appearances until they stopped responding to the work.
This sense of ownership was self-aware, it made people feel like they had a right to these objects, and that they had a space to express their opinions, but also revealed that they were sensitive to the privilege that gives the artist the ability to make and own these objects.
In many ways through these objects, Suhasini tried to create a balance between something that was ordinary yet extraordinary, something that belonged to the context yet stood apart from it, something that was in alignment with existing patterns and rhythms yet had an element of surprise and wonder. Sometimes this alienated people too much and sometimes it caused a serendipitous moment of engagement and reflection. Either way it created an imprint in the memory of the space, an opened up the possibility of shaping new encounters in public spaces that continue to imbue spaces with new meanings and narratives.
Parallel to the interactions on the street the creation of images of these objects and interactions, which will take on a life of their own in Suhasini’s studio and galleries, further shape our idea of the city and this neighbourhood. How will this circulation of images and the simultaneous repeated presence of these objects on the streets of Chitpur continue to shape the imagination of its people and its histories? Will it shape how people imagine the work of a signage maker, the symbolism of a rickshaw or the significance of our migrant labour force? These questions have been opened up through Suhasini’s work, and we have glimpsed a few possible responses. I am most curious to see how Suhasini continues to shape her own practice of embellishing the urban fabric and further opens up the process of creating this gesture to people who are a part of these encounters.
DESERT GREEN
– Alexander Keefe, 2009
Suhasini Kejriwal's “Garden of un-Earthly Delights” offers a double provocation. On the one hand, her decision to stage the show in a renovated haveli, or traditional merchant's mansion, at the foot of one of Rajasthan's most storied hilltop fortresses, marks an engagement with both a new type of audience and a new type of space, opening avenues for a renewed exploration of the fascinating mechanics behind the aesthetic experience. By taking her artwork outside the familiar, sanitized “white cube” space that lurks, like one of Plato's ideal metaphysical forms, behind the designs of most contemporary museums and galleries, Kejriwal plays against what is predictable, unsettling audience expectations and calling the “white cube” gallery ideal and its usual denizens—along with the network of values it represents and the aesthetic experience it helps to structure—into a challenging dialogue with a completely different set of parameters. But this most unusual garden represents another shift for Kejriwal as well. Here she takes a set of productive themes that have emerged quietly but forcefully in her canvases—dense hybridity between human and nonhuman forms, the malleability and manipulability of vision, the perverse and subtle delights of strange beauty—and renders them in full sculptural form. This is hardly her first sustained work with sculpture, but it is certainly her most fully realized to date.
The Anokhi Museum of Handblock Printing occupies a haveli whose style is somewhere between the neo-classical elegance of the nearby city of Jaipur, and the quaint domesticity of its ancient village setting. Shadowed by the looming ramparts of Amber Fort—whose own rambling structure reads like a palimpsest, shaped by additions and transformations that continued for centuries after its initial construction in the sixteenth century—the museum's haveli owes much of its architectural style to the example set by the city that ultimately sounded the death knell for the fort's haphazard expansion, and marked the arrival of something strikingly modern for its time: the new capital of Jaipur, built in 1727 by the ruler Sawai Jai Singh, was laid out according to a grid-based urban model that strikes a balance between the most innovative planning strategies of the Enlightenment and traditional approaches found in the Indian vastusastras. The typical early modern haveli was both a participant in the development of this new mode of urbanism, and also a refuge from it, a dichotomy epitomized by the division of the haveli's domestic space into areas of increasing intimacy and privacy. Kejriwal's sculptures, appropriately enough, occupy the liminal space of the mansion's courtyard, somehow both inside and outside, both private and exposed. But the space is just as notable for what it is not.
The “white cube” gallery ideal arrived on the Indian art scene at a moment of political poignancy, and potent optimism. The year was 1961, and the building was New Delhi's Rabindra Bhavan, built as the gallery annex for a new complex of buildings housing the joint offices of India's national academies for art, literature and drama. Designed by Habib Rahman—who had returned to India after studying under Walter Gropius at MIT, with a background in post-Bauhaus Internationalist architecture and design—the gallery space reflected the emergence of a new regime in India, a postcolonial modernity at once political and aesthetic, one that promised liberation and transcendence—transcendence of the stultifying constraints of atavistic tradition, of the trauma of Partition and the bile of communal hatreds, a liberation from a history of political subjugation and racist oppression. A utopian progress. Self-rule. Pandit Nehru consulted closely with Rahman on the gallery's design, and what resulted was something very close to what Irish conceptual artist and theorist Brian O'Doherty famously termed the “White Cube.”
In an influential series of articles written for ArtForum magazine between 1976 and 1981—later collected and published as Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space[1]—O'Doherty made the case that the advent of the now-familiar white-walled modern gallery space was not merely a matter of a simple “advance” in design or technology, nor did it passively “reflect” a changing set of ideas about the function of art and its relationship with the viewer; rather, the white cube, as a setting for the exhibition of modern art, was an active participant in this shift, carrying with it a certain ideology, a certain set of values all the more efficacious for their near invisibility. The “white cube” is hermetically sealed and sterilized, a laboratory environment for a new mode of interaction between viewer and artwork. Ringed by a zone of silence and solemnity, the human viewer is sublimated, fixed in position, transformed into what O'Doherty calls “a disembodied Eye.” And the work that is the object of the viewer's gaze undergoes a concomitant transmutation: its appearance in the otherwise blank space of the gallery decontextualizes and dehistoricizes it, giving it an aura of the eternal and the important. In this setting the work seems to transcend its own materiality, taking on a quasi-mystical, ethereal “life of its own.” The white cube is a stage-set for a “drama of perception,” a fairy tale in which the gallery space—the world itself—disappears, giving the illusion of neutral, immediate, unmediated access between viewer and object, binding them in a moment of shared transcendence as they leave this world far behind, erasing life, suspending them in a chamber of “eternal display” sterilized with antiseptic, irradiating light. The modern gallery space powerfully structures the appearance of the object, and the experience of the viewer—all the more powerfully because it seems not to be there at all, casting a veneer of inevitability and eternity over what is in fact a deeply political, historically and culturally situated status quo. In this way, the “white cube” gallery space works like a theater for these seductive, overreaching claims of modernity.
But just look now at what Rabindra Bhavan has become—it is a good metaphor—overrun with bureaucratic infighting and intrigue, chopped up by disastrous “renovation” projects that threaten to convert it into something resembling a middling, mediocre mini-mall; tarted-up and abused, no longer a center for cutting-edge art, no longer a center for anything beyond its own sordid office politics and the dischordant seeds that had been hidden in its history from the day they laid the first stone. What posed as eternity was really nothing more than a faltering grasp at it, yet another faltering, failing grasp at it. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see that there was always noise in modernity's idealized zone of silence and awe, always children laughing, sneezing, singing when they were supposed to be standing there quietly. There was always history, always humanity infiltrating, intruding, crawling in between the cracks and making that white space fecund, and green.
Suhasini Kejriwal's “The Garden of Un-Earthly Delights” performs just such a greening, transforming the historic haveli home of the Anokhi Museum of Hand Printing into a thorny artificial landscape, a technicolor sculpture garden of sharp cactus hedges, densely embroidered and crawling with monstrous flesh-pink arthropods and dark, hirsute hybrids. Kejriwal constructs a fantasy territory that sits unsettlingly poised somewhere in the borderlands between the natural and the otherworldly, a nightmarishly beautiful alien desert that spills through the historic building's spaces in a collision that evokes the city's sere hinterlands, its complex historical imagination, and the unique visual culture and fabric arts that have developed there.
Black anemones bristle with midnight-blue bottlebrush fur and glistening nests of dark, oily curls. With this set of three untitled works Kejriwal returns to a medium that she first experimented with in 2007, creating sculptures located somewhere between audacious wig and monstrous living form. But her treatment isn't repulsive or grotesque: the grafting Kejriwal engages in here—as elsewhere—is structured, centripetal, and ornamental. It is as though the artist knows that the dark mingling she wants to achieve requires restraint, and beauty. We see a midnight starfish, covered in spider fur, a bun of human hair twisted into its center; in another, there is a careful cluster of braids. These sculptural gestures—at once menacing and beautiful—call upon the elegant architecture of the haveli, its lithe moldings and precise geometries, its terracotta pink walls and marble-floored atrium. At the same time they evoke the quotidian aestheticism that once lived here, the daily art of a woman at her toilette, the young girl holding the mirror and watching as black strands of hair are marshalled into beautiful order.
Kejriwal's response to this unique setting isn't frenzy but quiet, productive infiltration. The aesthetic life of the haveli's quasi-domestic interior and its inhabitants is evoked from an unexpected angle, and then rigorously pursued: a cluster of velveteen cacti—untitled, like all the other pieces in this garden—strike an uneasy balance between desert and drawing room, between supple touchability and metal-spiked repulsion, between the soft and the sharp. These upholstered sentinels are paradoxically pointy cushions, or perhaps impossibly soft-skinned cacti. In either case, Kejriwal forges a collaboration between form, material and exhibition space, a collaboration that frustrates the “white cube's” sublimating oblivion, disallowing a reductive lapse into disembodied visual contemplation on the part of the viewer precisely by creating a zone of sharp-toothed temptation, a miniature forest of problematic hybrids. A hallmark of the artist's two-dimensional work is the way in which she plays with the mechanics of vision; here, she seems to push that impulse even further, bringing the materiality of her objects into sharp focus and manipulating the circuits of communication that bind hand to eye. Another cluster of cactus giants looms huge in the courtyard's corner—one wonders what it looks like from the sight line of a child—a spiky riot of variegated color, embroidery, and obsessively intricate patchwork detail. Here Kejriwal takes a technique that she has developed to great effect in her paintings and realizes it in three-dimensional form: dense horror vacui and thick, fluxing visual fields whose patterns interact, collide, overlap and refuse to resolve themselves. The eye finds no rest on these corrugated monoliths, no safe stable spot where it can stand cooly apart; they are like monuments to the materiality of vision, to its thorny ungraspability, irreducible, impossibly complex and delightful.
Every home has its rules, its unique regimens of etiquette, hygiene and control, but very few would play a willing host to gigantic insects. This haveli crawls with them: improbable insectoid intruders lurk on all sides, flesh-toned infiltrators and germ-vectors, rendered with monstrous violations of scale, disrupting the antiseptic space of the home, of the museum, of the aesthetic experience. A human-sized cockroach is, of course, a child's delight, a storybook nightmare made real, glistening with a visceral mammalian pink. Magnified like this, its body is suddenly visible in an unprecedented way: the articulations of its exoskeleton, its long feelers, its imposing physicality—all take on the appearance of a living, alien machine, creeping across the tiled marble flatland of the checkerboard chiaroscuro on the floor.
Rising from the fountain at the center of the interior courtyard is another untitled sculpture, a most unusual tree, with green, waxy leaves that blow open into staring, blood-rimmed eyes. Here, Kejriwal takes the readymade eyes that are found on religious objects across North India—giving life and presence to even the most simple aniconic, vermillion-smeared stone—and puts them to use, pulling her tall, slender shrub into the fuzzy space between anatomy and botany, between the human and nonhuman, as surely as she pulls it in the liminal space of the atrium courtyard, that zone where the air and sunlight and dust of the outside world commingle with the symmetry and privacy of the building's interior. Kejriwal's remarkable sculpture stares back at you, reversing the gaze of the viewer, as though offering a challenge to any passive spectator. The tiny readymade pupils that in the context of a humble village shrine work to open up visual circuits of communication, or darshan, between the human world and the divine, in this context find themselves at work on a different, albeit analogous, project, pushing back against the spectator's gaze, transforming the object of vision into a panoptical, unsleeping watchman: no matter which way you look at me I'll always be staring back.
Kejriwal's unearthly landscape hides other human hybrids as well. It is as though the very organs that we use to apprehend these cacti and insects and creatures have leapt out from our bodies, disengaging from our anatomical particularity and jumping out into the world, attaching themselves to the objects of their consideration, binding with them in patterns of beautifully disturbing symbiosis. The eyes on the plant's spray of leaves look back at our own eyes. But what do we make of the the cabbage plant, bolted and exposing human brains that had been hidden inside—like yolks encased in a green vegetal shell—now hatched, exposed and rampant, poised next to the doorway like a tulsi plant? The safe separation of subject and object breaks down. This feels still, and hushed, and strange.
Take a step back from the “Garden of Un-Earthly Delights” and consider its various breaks with the expected: the “white cube” exhibition ideal—with its neat sanitizations, its silence, its positioning of work and audience—has been eschewed, overturned and left behind; the creatures that typically call the “white cube” home—dealers, professional critics, hobnobbing artists and gallerists—have been forced to jostle for space with a different, more heterogeneous crowd, whose interactions with the objects on display may be just as varied, just as distinct from what the art-scene regulars take for granted, for normal. What results is a kind of careful but dynamic grafting, a bending of the branches, a splicing of alien shoots onto unaccustomed rootstock. And old trees are persuaded to bear new kinds of fruit.
[1] University of California Press, 2000.