EVERYDAY EXTRAORDINARY

– Suhasini Kejriwal, 2020

Since 2015, it has been my privilege to engage with Chitpur in Kolkata and Chor Bazar in Mumbai in several capacities – flaneur, photographer, artist, witness and even collaborator – to create an archive of a few thousand images. I used this archive to make rich, layered, embroidered photo composites that echo the quiet but extraordinary beauty of the daily lives of the people who live and work here.

My first walk in Chor Bazar was like a stroll on a theatre set decked with old buildings, bizarre antiques and exquisite furniture strewn on cramped, lived roads. On narrower lanes, the live set had props like hanging tires and piles of automobile junk amidst endless antique car carcasses that enlivened the lived spaces. In Chitpur, beautiful and crumbling buildings were laced with dainty balconies, and decrypt walls were emboldened by lurid Jatra theatre posters.

Trawling these fascinating arenas of street theatrics over the next four years helped me build my extensive collection of photos and drawings. Initially, I remained detached but aesthetically attuned. But as time went by, what fascinated me was the poetry of the everyday in these picturesque, historic neighbourhoods.

Instead of just responding to the surreal beauty of the streets, I became aware of my role as an artist and witness to the dramatic changes that reshaped Chor Bazar due to extreme redevelopment. I began to notice the interactions among people and their environments, their work, their leisure, their children and the animals that lived with them, and the daily rhythm of their lives and its chaos and calm.

The richness of the experience of walking, witnessing, photographing and drawing the neighbourhoods is echoed in the layering of images to create complex composites. This visual complexity involves a slowing down in the way an image is made and processed. What is captured is not only visual detail but also the passage of time, recorded in the many layers of the composites. Aside from being used as embellishment or adding a rich, inky depth, the embroidery is also an important part of this slowing-down process.

The visual memory of my time spent in these neighborhoods is presented not as a set of fleeting aesthetic impressions but as a deeper emotional and psychological response.

While I was able to populate the empty white cube of the gallery space with the surreal beauty of the streets through these composites, I wondered whether my engagement with the city could also simultaneously address the streets. I was able to explore this question both individually as an artist and collaboratively as part of an art collective during my fellowship with Hamdasti, a collective located in the neighbourhood of Chitpur. It has been present in my discussions with Hamdasti's founding member Sumona Chakrabarty during our preliminary walks in Chitpur, and then later while looking at my work in my studio, and eventually while collaborating on different projects for the collective. The question, simply put, is this: is it possible to blur the lines between the public and the private spaces of making and experiencing an artwork?

Hamdasti works in Chitpur to create a platform for meaningful dialogue, interaction and civic participation between artists and communities. As part of my two-year fellowship with them, I collaborated with a signage maker in Chitpur to produce a series of artworks that combined text with readymades. These were displayed and performed on the streets of Chitpur as artistic interventions in daily life.

Imbuing these objects with layers of meaning and placing them back within their contexts created curiosity and surprise, leading to unusual interactions between our collective and the audience on the streets. It gave me the unexpected ability to layer a landscape with new meaning.

With Hamdasti, I was also involved in establishing pedagogical processes that reflect the journey of our collective – starting from the locality it is situated in to ultimately opening up dialogue and discussions in other cultural centres of the city. This was done through exhibitions, presentations and discussions between the residents of Chitpur, artists and visitors.

I believe that a body of work may originate in response to specific situations in different community spaces, but it can and should enter the conversation of mainstream art with careful and thoughtful editing of work and exhibition‐making. For me, this has been a crucial part of engaging with the notion of the city as a shared space.

The beauty of this journey has been in the expansion of my detached vision as flaneur and artist to a more empathetic role as witness and collaborator.

EDEN

– Suhasini Kejriwal, 2014

“Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking.”
- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust.

The experience of walking in an Indian city is rich, complex, and challenging, all at once. Nowhere else can this be seen and felt more keenly than in the slow, chaotic throb of the streets. The typical Indian street, with its sheer density of people, cars, food, merchandise and rubbish, is mind-boggling. All boundaries are blurred here: between private and public, sacred and profane, man and animal. People buy, sell, eat, sleep, cook, bathe, urinate and defecate on the street. One must literally weave and dodge their way in order to survive the jungle-like obstacle courses of our streets. Earlier, this world seemed familiar and normal (as it does to most of us). It held no fascination for me and was, as it were, invisible. 

After being away for almost seven years, when I came back to India, I started seeing our streets in a new light. Suddenly, things became visible, fascinating, and sometimes disturbing. I began to notice the stark contrasts and profusions everywhere: the pile of rubbish near a pyramid of fruits, the public urinal near a street shrine, and the person whose hand I nearly stepped on while navigating the streets. The lack of space and order in the streets generates a claustrophobia that is overwhelming. 

Yet, despite all the odds, human beings, animals, and even trees and plants continue to thrive, and the city continues to expand. In and around the ruins of old, derelict buildings, new structures spring up with remarkable alacrity, gleaming new cars share roads with outdated models, and the youth easily outnumber the old.

The new constantly rubs against the old – be it buildings, cars, people, traditions and even aesthetics. This lends the city a rich, ambivalent beauty that is uniquely its own. Over a period of four years, I have walked many streets, lanes and by-lanes, and have built a large archive of several thousand photographs and sketches of people, animals, buildings, trees, traffic, fruit and vegetable markets, and rubbish heaps. 

In the beginning, I was merely taking pictures and sketching details that caught my eye but, eventually, large drawings began to emerge out of my photographs and sketches. The dense and complex imagery, and the vastness of scale were breathtaking; it is this very sense of wonder that I have tried to explore in my large, black-and-white paintings. On the one hand, these paintings are a detailed, complex and unending list of an environment teeming with multiple images and readings. On the other, they are starkly flat: an impenetrable and unforgettable surface of disturbing jumbled images. It’s as if all the humanity and grunge of the city is right in the viewer’s face. 

My work with the city and its streets has led me to discover and explore the psychological and emotional experience of living in these Edenic surroundings.

As Solnit says in Wanderlust, walking leads you to “find what you don’t know you are looking for.”

GARDEN OF UN-EARTHLY DELIGHTS

– Suhasini Kejriwal, 2009

I construct images and places that are at once gardens and urban jungles – both psychological constructs and cultural landscapes. In my sculptures of fictional, anthropomorphized plants that are composed of brightly colored body parts and foliage, I reflect upon the Human/Nature divide, and how the gap between the real and the imaginary, the everyday and the fantastic, and the familiar and the unfamiliar is constantly being negotiated in our own perception. 

How has technology changed the way we look at Nature? Plants and animals that were once exotic are now commonplace – instantly recognizable from their many images in magazines, on television, and on the internet. The human body is hardly as mysterious as it once was. Graphic, highly detailed images and videos of all these are now a part of popular culture. But it seems that despite this abundance of information, Nature and the human body continue to compel the human imagination. Like our ancestors, we continue to be fascinated by our bodies and our surroundings. They are not only a part of science and fine art but also a part of popular culture and design.

I am also interested in engaging with how artists have viewed Nature and the human body through different periods in the history of art. It is like a vast archive of human consciousness – a rich resource for understanding the evolution of the human viewpoint on the body, its surroundings and, indeed, Nature. For instance, the excess, theatricality, and dark humour in the works of the surrealists completely changed how we view everyday objects and the human body. In fact, a few centuries ago, Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Garden of Earthly Delights was an early precursor to the works of the surrealists because of its joyful excess, theatricality, absurdity and hallucinatory details. In a completely different way, Rousseau’s evocation of an imaginary, exotic world constructed almost entirely from second-hand sources in his studio has the power to lift us from the mundane into another world altogether. Similarly, over the centuries, many artists have created windows into imaginary, fictional worlds that help us transcend the numbing reality of the everyday.

Over the years, however, with the crazy proliferation of images in the media, both print and virtual, it has become increasingly difficult for an artist to present a fresh and memorable image. Our consciousness is not easily touched, let alone shocked. Images are too easily consumed and discarded. So, in these circumstances, a dense, intense image that slows down our interaction with it has the potential to provide us with a rich, meaningful visual experience. The use of deliberate contradictions and juxtapositions in the work, both visually as well as materially, allows the emergence of a strange, compelling beauty which may, in turn, become a possible springboard for the transformation of the mind and emotion.

SELECTED WORKS

– Suhasini Kejriwal, 2002

In a world of immediate gratification, the image in Art establishes a complex relationship with its viewer. Non-linear. Non-consumptive. Non-verbal. Non-judgmental.

My practice presents complex objects and densely layered imagery, creating an "expanded" moment of encounter between the viewer and the work of art.

The process of painting or drawing becomes important in itself. It is no longer just a descriptive tool. The density of image, intensity of colour and paint application, and excessive detail together create a layered visual impact and an enhanced experience of time. In other words, in a world in which most images are about immediate gratification, I address a gap in comprehension when one is faced with the works, underscoring our constant negotiation between what is 'real' and what is psychologically projected or anticipated, thus exploring the relationship between viewership and the psychological constructs of reality.