Receptacles, Residues, Retributions from my Remaining Life / Anupama Alias

"You were there. I could hear you, but I only caught glimpses of you in the glass. Eventually I gave in and found myself staring at myself, reflected. Looking at myself looking back at me. Both of us trying to decipher the face that was in front of us. My eyes seeing me in mine and countless. "

— An excerpt from Then She fell, an immersive theater, based on the story of Alice in Wonderland.

It has been something that is stuck to each other, inseparably. I have been looking for that chord that binds my heart and my soul. The essence of my self. These works are an attempt to find the woman in me. A silent transition that whispered to me: girl, you are a woman now! I have been concerned about the state of a woman and the issues revolving the status of womanhood. I wanted to find out the identity of a woman. This must have happened sometime in 2014 when I was first ushered in a single hostel room far away from the cocoon-like comfort of my home and family. The solitude within the four walls initiated a dialogue between me and the me inside me. The conversations took the form of a journey and I began unraveling the secrets lying within the rib cage.

They say Eve was made from Adam’s rib. Why? Nobody knows. The intriguing reason behind the rib became the genesis of my work and I began exploring the human anatomy.

I have become like a temple
I have made my form from
His form and I am
Trying to be worthy of me

The rib cage become the spine of my works and also led me to other body parts and I started discovering myself in that process. The skin, flesh, brain, heart, lungs, blood cells all joined in an unending flow from which I began gathering whatever residues I could pick up. It was not just objects that I collected but also memories. When I heard grown ups recollecting nuggets from their memories I collected them too and also transported myself to the childhood that belonged to me. That was the time when I began becoming the others I interacted with and began internalizing their experiences. It instilled a fear in me and I hid behind the stories that my mother would pull out from her own childhood. And I began the search for myself. Who is this me that is tenaciously using this other me for its own tenacities? I was a woman coming of age.

It is a project that is still in progress. Thus I am focusing on woman in me and other women at a transitional and vulnerable time in their lives: not the teenage years that have been the focus of my work for the past few years, but the other transitional, in-between years: the ‘middle’ years since I left my adolescence behind. My work focuses on people, transitions, identity, and being in-between. I try to unravel the implied desires and fluctuations of identity that my womanhood has thrust on me. The idea is to not just focus on the universality of womanhood but get to the essence of being a girl first and a woman later. I dig deep into my stencils with the lantern in one hand and a lit matchstick in the other. AS my work burns in the fire of my passionate quest, it leaves black residual lines, which I visualize as forming the contours of my self.

Our personal lives, choices and goals are specific to each of us, but the issues are often universal when seen in the larger picture. The choice of subject for this body of work is an organic and natural one. I am a ‘woman coming of age’, just starting to feel like an adult myself. And I am aware of the fact that I might have to take on the roles of mother, wife, partner and daughter and with time they will all be redefined. I have immediate knowledge of how a woman perceives herself and is perceived, and realise that she is often undergoing similar transitions and can be as vulnerable as the young woman coming of age, the me in me, that I have etched over the past few years. It is not only how a woman sees herself and is seen. It is the fact that as she observes herself being observed more critically. The work is self-reflexive and somewhat autobiographical in nature and shows qualities that each woman brings to each of the work. I have gone up and down the mountain, strolled down the garden path, floated, drifted, nearly drowned in choppy waters. Yet, I am yet to find myself.

And my singing
Becomes the only sound of a
Blue/black/magical/woman. Walking.
Womb ripe. Walking. Loud with mornings. Walking.

Making pilgrimage to herself. Walking.

Title: Receptacles, Residues, Retributions from my Remaining Life
Size : 10 cm x 6.5 cm ( 90 frames with both sides)
Mixed Medium
Anupama Alias, Kerala, India

The Custodian of Dy(e)ing / K L Leon, Kerala

The Custodian of Dy(e)ing, 2016
184 cm x 612 cm
Oil on canvas
K L Leon, Kerala, India

Artist's Note:

While new forms of subjectivity and sensibilities are being excavated and defined through different modalities, painting remains a true study of our existence. In the context of South Asia, artists have been relentlessly investigating history to challenge contemporary mainstream suppositions and prejudices. But there still exists a certain construct that expects artists to take part in the, still-ongoing, post-colonial process of redefining cultural specificities while still being mired in the colonial and pre-colonial clichés about nation/regional identity.

I believe that politics without imagination is equitable to bureaucracy; however it's juxtaposition with man-made tools and cultural produce allows me to establish a world that reflects my ‘locality’ without being merely nostalgic. And without this recourse to nostalgia, my work seeks to confront broad shadows of doubt that plagues notions of history, culture, migration, and place.

The work for Young Subcontinent, curated by Riyas Komu, is an exploration of historical, cultural, and political roots through still-life allegories. But the danger with allegories is that it can easily be misrepresented as myth when placed out of time and history. Capturing these allegories, as a painter, then becomes an act of making emblems out of lands, myths, cultures and lives. Therefore it becomes essential that the work also address the critical methods of archiving, research and intervention while harnessing new narratives to amplify perception.

In that context, the work seeks to explore landscape(s), through historical and cultural vignettes, and its increasing alienation from its nature and 'roots' as a result of expanding industrialisation and urbanisation. This landscape not only takes advantage of the lived and living histories of the land and its people, its colours, memories, cycles of birth and death, and even its flora and fauna but also of contemporary art's incompleteness and ability to host many narratives without conforming to a determined discourse. Though "nostalgia" is often invoked as an yearning for 'purity' and the 'good old times', my landscape(s) seeks to assert that the artist too is very much a part of the world; that the canvas itself is not a transcript, but rather a carefully created construct where the local seeks precedence over the global.

Invisible connection-II / Mekh Limbu, Nepal

Invisible connection-II
note by Mekh Limbu

My art work is a visual diary about relationship between me and my father. I will be using intimate letters, recordings of phone conversation between us, family photographs of social gathering, celebrations, festivals, images of my father at his workplace, with his friends in the camp and his short visits to Nepal, documents and official paper works and belongings of our family in my art work.

I belong to Kirat origin; youth joinining the British and Indian Army is very common trend in my society. However, in later days the pattern of migration shifted. Most of my relatives and villagers were flying to Malaysia and gulf countries as labor workers. My father was a primary School teacher at Dhankuta, Nepal before he joined a Construction Company at Doha, Qatar and have been working there for 20 years. Being only person to earn in the family of eight members, it was very difficult and challenging for him to run the family as a primary school teacher. Therefore he left Nepal when I was just 8 years old. Though he was not physically presence his continuous support, love and care was sensed in the family.

In the course of 20 years my father visited us only four times. In the meantime, Nepal went through major socio- political and technological changes like royal family’s massacre, civil war, end of monarchy, movement for democracy & federal government and endless strikes. All of these affected the socio-economic structure of the country. This instability in the country led to more internal and international migration. While most of my friends were applying for foreign education or employment, I joined Fine Art College in the capital city and I started my career as an artist.

During my father initial days of work, he used to say "This place is like a desert with very few people, It is hard to find another Nepali here." Qatar with its oil production, liberalization policies and economic development strategies has become Newly Industrialized Country which demand more Foreign Migrant Workers (FMWs). This lead to explosion in FMWs. Now my father says, "You meet almost all the youths from a particular Nepali village." Qatar has witnessed its rise from being a small fishing port in the middle of the desert to a multibillion dollar country with the contribution of tears, blood and life of millions of Foreign Migrant Workers.

Me and my father’s life diverted in different directions because of his absence for such a long time. The intimacy we had slowly faded away, although he tried to keep it alive through frequent communication by means of letter and phone calls. This is a critical problem in many families in our country. Like my father there are millions of Nepalese who works outside of Nepal separated from their families. The issue of International labor migration is my personal experience but it is related with many other people who are also facing these critical circumstances. Every day almost 1700 people are leaving Nepal for work. And most of them are young people.

Display:
The work constitutes of two adjacent walls right angle to each other (corner wall). On one wall depicts my own timeline and another wall depicts my father's time line. The timeline is represented through intimate photographs, letters , mirrors, the excerpt from the political events, social and cultural changes, personal belongings and voice recordings of conversation between me and my father, installed in the wooden boxes of different sizes indicating the different events in different time periods which we face during all these 20 years of separation.