SANGEETA WADDHWANI BRINGS YOU A VIVID ENCOUNTER OF THE FEMINIST ARTISTIC KIND…WALKING THROUGH AN EXHIBITION WITH THE TALENTED SILO SULEMAN AT ART MUSINGS, MUMBAI
Here’s toasting my first ‘normal’, non-mediated art experience since lockdown! Trust the vivacious Sangeeta Raghavan of Art Musings gallery, to take this first bold step in the New Normal. I immediately took her up on the invitation to do a walk through with ‘viral” artist Shiv Silo Suleman (yes the exotic half-Muslim half Hindu creator), at the downtown gallery, a legend of a space in the annals of Mumbai’s arteratti.
Shilo is a statuesque, dusky and creatively turbo-charged young woman who strangely exudes such a spirit of transparency, her clothes seem superfluous on her! With Shilo one can see that there is no boundary really between nature, her own body-mind construct… and her art. In fact even her process is her. She merges right into her installations even as she exists independently of them.
Shilo offers a sensory meditation, as she opens the experience of our walkthrough by setting off a gong. Just the way we set off a bell when entering a temple. And lo…suspended all around the space are brass goddess body parts, suggesting a decimated, destroyed dream, an echo of Lord Shiva ferrying the carcass of his beloved, self-immolated Sati. “As parts of the Goddess fell across the body of India, temples sprouted there, enshrining each part. So Nainital is where Sati’s eyes fell, and Kamakhya Temple in Guwahati is where her womb and yoni fell,” (Yes it is well known that the goddess menstruates around June, and the surrounding Bramhaputra River turns red. There are 51 such Shakti Peeths around India.)
The mood shifts to exploring the idea of a cosmic flood..a poetic leitmotif both in our Vishnu avatar story (he is born as a tiny fish which grows until only the sea can accommodate him) and the Biblical destruction myth of Noah’s arc. Vishnu as Matsya the fish, is here to help save lives from the cyclical destruction of flooding…and accompanying this is the installation of a giant scaly brass fish, a water filled lower torso and legs of a goddess (possibly the earth), and text that repeatedly makes poetry of floods…neatly written on the floor.
The video installation showing Shilo immersed in water and carrying a giant metallic fish, has her body highlighted with gold leaf, but little else. It clearly hints of a near sexual communion with the sacred element of water…her sensual sighing is both provocative and nihilistic.
“Daily we put jal into the goddess torso, we ring the gong, we offer flowers to the heart sculpture downstairs, we treat this as a sacred, living space, My practice is going more and more in this direction,” she explains.
As we walk down to the first level, we see stunning canvas iterations of her themes, figurative works with a restrained colour palette, trademark gold leaf highlights, merging all that’s earthy with all that’s precious. “This work is called Sovereign and it is about how the only ruling force or crown I bow down to, is nature. That’s the only Empire,” she explains, adding, “And guess what..Corona means Crown!”
They say all true artists create not from only the personal but also channel the Universal. I point out that the primordial ‘story’ under the Pandemic is to worship back at the altar of nature – not Fast Fashion, not new concrete towers, or ozone busting gadgets or air travel. Shilo agrees. And this is why her works feel so gently wild…they are layered wildernesses… celebrating the sensuality of flowers, soil, raw gold, and the beauty of the female form.
“Like the Earth, the female form has been inducted into the language of consumerism, commodified…” I say. She agrees. Whether it is the display of goddess body parts, or a chastity belt (symbolizing the societal takeover of female sexuality), or her Kahloesque nudes, self portraits showing shadow selves, she nudges at the sexual sell which has nothing to do with the wholesome beauty of unfettered femaleness. “Women need to reclaim their wholesomeness..away from the projections that sell movies, products, perpetuate false womanhood,” she concurs. I can’t resist telling her how my last book, Mind the Gap! explores the same idea..
I am then deeply moved when we enter the “heartspace” of her exhibit, where a wittily recreated brass human heart appears to have a human face. Shilo, like many young women, has experienced the profound pain of heartbreak, but as she is so philosophically aligned to ideas of reincarnation and seeds regenerating in cyclical rhythms, one sees an eternal romantic in handwritten letters interspersed with gold leaf; “Containing some true expressions of love, some orchestrated,” she shares. She borrows from Urdu literature, quoting the legendary Faiz Ahmad Faiz in a painting, and borrows from Islamic architectural ideas in an impressive life-sized monument to.love. The monument is clearly inspired by nostalgia; to earthly delights showing the heavenly sentiment of romantic attachment
There is so much passion and earthiness in both Shilo and her show, one leaves feeling that even if humanity has forgotten the sacred in the ‘consumption’ of the feminine, has forgotten the delicate grace of ritual and the writing of love letters…has even lost touch with the diurnal beauty of sunrises and sunsets, a show like this will nudge at such amnesia…it bears the signature of the times, pregnant with nostalgia and hope, sensuality and surrender…
Little wonder I never forgot seeing Shilo’s work at the India Art Fair back in 2018! She is traveling along an honest path, one that is healing to view and encounter.
The show, titled We Meet Here from the Afterlife, will be on display till March 27 at Art Musings gallery, Colaba, Mumbai
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