OUR BODIES, OUR CITIES

IF CITIES LOOK LIKE ALL HUSTLE AND CONCRETE TO SOME, SANGEETA BABANI’S CANVASES MAKE THOSE VERY ATTRIBUTES A COLOURFUL FIESTA! SANGEETA WADDHWANI MEETS THE ARTIST WHO WAS RECENTLY APPROACHED TO ‘ARTIFY’ AN AREA NEAR THE MUMBAI SEA LINK, PART OF THE BMC’S 25 CRORE INITIATIVE IN LIEU OF THE G20 PRESIDENCY.  WHILE SHE REVELS IN CAPTURING THE SEA, SKY, BUILDINGS, TREES AND FLORA FOR THIS WORK, HER OWN CANVASES CONTEMPLATE A HOST OF CITY SCENARIOS – FROM LADIES LUNCHING TO EROTIC MOMENTS BETWEEN COUPLES SPRAWLED OVER CONCRETE TO ICONS DRIPPING CHARISMA…  HERE’S A CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH THE CITY-LOVING ARTIST

 

 

SANGEETA BABANI is on a roll!

One has been watching her, sleeves all rolled up, atop ladders, moving her roll-on brushes over rough wall surfaces to complete a mural titled, ‘Think Blue to go Green’, created in association with the BMC, and sponsored by S Raheja Realty. One has known Sangeeta to always have an open, near playful approach to her art practice of over two decades. Just glance through her history, and one sees how she was approached to paint the Tata Nano, created a funky 3D installation for the Palladium Mall (inspired by obsolete tech), and now, has been chosen to be part of a high-budget municipal drive to beautify Mumbai tapping into the city’s abundant creativity and artistic spirit. (You will see this work at the Bandra Reclamation Underpass towards the Sea Link).

 

“The inspiration and concept had to go with the surroundings of the area,” she shares. “The Arabian sea is close by and we have beautifully landscaped Nature around; these became an integral part of this composition.”

 

One has seen a host of young artists, of all ages, painting the surfaces around Mumbai, mostly after dark. “We hope this work, and the entire initiative, will inspire others to think how they can beautify their own communities, ” shares Sangeeta. While the current drive to go beautiful is definitely frantic, this is a good time to acknowledge how the Jindals had engaged with street artists to bring vibrancy to neighbourhoods and buildings around Mumbai, and even the Rouble Nagi Foundation has placed playfull installations near the Alibag jetty and prettified slum colonies with an arresting array of hues.

A FIRST LOOK AT BABANI’S WORKS

One recalls having first set eyes on Sangeeta Babani’s vibrant urbanscapes at the iconic Jehangir Art Gallery, in April 2022. Having looked at a host of abstractions and nature revisitations post-Pandemic, I was fascinated that here was an artist who LOVED cities! Her vibrant works depicted nudes and erotic moods, ladies who lunch and domestic goddesses, all at ease in a hectic urban whirl. Also a byproduct of cities, she has painted even cinematic icons, who arrive on her canvases dripping with notes of the real and surreal, the forbidden and the archetypal…

RE-EMBRACING URBAN LIFE

The more one walked around Sangeeta’s works, the more one could pick up on how she celebrates the spirit of possibility, happy collisions, city style statements, cataclysmic hits and misses. She doesn’t believe art should be too ‘real’ as then how would it tease the imagination? So one intuitively appreciates her choice to throw splashes of primary colour where we would usually see 50 shades of grey across buildings and sidewalks.

Babani’s works hold on to the idea that the urban jungle is a place of hidden colours revealed by her art. There is a humanism in her depictions, where ordinary lives have extraordinary beauty. ‘Urbsphilia’ – the love of urban ecosystems – had come back to life again. Babani’s repertoire, seemed to remind us all that while nature spoke to the soul, cities were still the place to dream, to fall in love, to dalliance with perfect strangers and to revel in the mocktail of the moment.

“As an artist, I am seduced by a white canvas that allows me to transform it with the aura of colour and a variety of elements. Each line represents an accumulation of many moments, emotions, feelings – some strong, some diluted, some welcome, others not so welcome. You will see joy, envy, ecstasy, contentment. At the end of the day, Life comes out of our Mind. I truly believe thoughts mould the world in a direct form through actions and feelings. Colours and bold brush strokes help me breathe and have become a language for me!”

As always, she had inspirational people around – Priiya Dutt who posed with a portrait of her late mother Nargis, beautifully rendered by Sangeeta. There was Niladri Kumar, the ‘Zakir Hussain’ of the sitar. There were an assortment of writers, media mavens, influencers and a delightful sense of creative community. It certainly helps to have these luminaries flock one’s artistic outings, given the city’s media machinery wakes up pronto! Sangeeta shares, whether it is a Javed Akhtar or Shabana Azmi, a Rishi Kapoor, “I have just requested their support and they have been there for me… just out of goodwill and respect for my art. Nothing more.. that is the truth.”

 

THE PRIVATE AND THE PUBLIC

It’s interesting when the artist says, “I draw inspiration from people with emotions that communicate a sense of tranquility and privacy, moods which I value above everything else.”

 

We look at her series of nudes and works which show couples intertwined in connubial bliss. These sit almost with a sense of public apology – in discreet corners of her home. But within the paintings, the lovers are free… copulating across the concrete jungle.  “Well cityscapes run through all of my works, as you know. But by placing lovemaking couples in the public urban domain, I was portraying love with no boundaries of space or time. Just bringing love together with freedom.”

Such works are definitely a nod to our ancient love of erotic depictions… and the terrible post-colonial denial. The naked body is treated as an offence… what will the radicals do next? Blame an outside influence for the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho and Konark, and texts like the Kamasutra?

Sangeeta laughs at this, and in turn, asks, “Why paint animals in nature? Why paint and draw trees, flowers, animals, cityscapes? There is nothing more beautiful than the natural form. We are magnificent creatures. Would you put a sheet over an animal to paint it?”

FROM SEXUAL SELL TO SEXUAL HELL

“We’ve become far too obsessed about sex and nudity, where nude doesn’t mean sex, it simply means unclothed. There is something mysterious and utterly beautiful in the depiction of a human body. It reminds us that the human body can be both beautiful and grotesque, innocent and sexualized, free and controlled. It forces us to consider where our own beliefs fall in these spectrums,” muses Sangeeta, begging the question, ‘where do our own beliefs fall?

I share with her how I have interviewed Indian scholars who were so repressed they denied that erotic sculptures have a place in Hindu temples and were considered auspicious! In Tantra, the uniting of the male and female was looked upon as a coming together of earth and sky, most auspicious… and only royal figures were offered the secrets of sexual alchemy, as it lead to prosperity and super powers!

THE RICHLY DELINEATED NUDES PITTED AGAINST URBANSCAPES BY SANGEETA REMIND US PERHAPS OF TODAY’S CASUAL URBAN DALLIANCES (ABOVE)

In 2016,  at the Jaipur Art Summit, yours truly had seen a London-based painter, Radha Binod Sharma’s works labelled ‘offensive’ by radical vandals who tried to rupture the canvas and injure the artist. Similarly, Kolkata-based artist Eleena Banik had ‘the moral police’ vandals trying to destroy her nudes at the iconic Jehangir Art Gallery, about a decade ago.  She was forced to take those particular works down. Remember Ravi Varma’s tryst with nudity when his apsaras were panned? Remember MF Husain’s exile from India owing to a nude Goddess Saraswati?

THE CONTROVERSIAL WORK BY ARTIST RADHA BINOD SHARMA AND THE LADIES WHO PROTESTED A BIT TOO MUCH, ALMOST INJURING THE ARTIST

Says Sangeeta, as we continue to look at her sensuous and erotic work, “At times this form of art turns into a controversy, at times it becomes a prayer. However, if you see an artwork with a shallow eye, you will only find nudity. But when you go deeper, it shows the profundity of expressions imprinted on it.”

“The first thing that needs to be changed is your own world, in order to change the world itself. This requires changing your mind. Freedom is a state of mind. The most alluring quality of art is to question our preconceptions about the roles we consciously and subconsciously play in life. There is a beautiful quote here:

“What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is nobler than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?”

– Michaelangelo

TWO WORKS BY MF HUSAIN BEFORE HIS EXILE FROM INDIA (ABOVE)

 

TAKING ART OUT OF HALLOWED GALLERIES INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

Like a Husain, Babani does not believe art should sit in elitist spaces. As mentioned earlier, she has painted ‘live’, in public, over the Tata Nano car after being discovered by the Tata team, who were going through various art galleries to locate an artist whose work was vibrant, and who was comfortable creating and interacting with audiences all at once at the launch event. “They saw my work in Pradarshak Art Gallery and loved it. So I got to paint over the Nano!” she smiles, a twinkle in her eye at the memory.

 

Not for Sangeeta any need to be an enigma huddled in a studio, who one never meets as a real person.

Another experiment she embraced was creating an installation called The Lost Art: The Art of Imperfect Progress, which featured in a lifestyle and luxury destination – the Palladium Mall. Yes, we have seen installations by Valay Shende here, we have seen EztablishArt.com stage an exhibition here… but what set this installation apart? In a universe of breakneck speed, where today’s tech becomes yesterday’s e-waste, this 18 foot tall work, fully hand-painted, asked for a pause. “It took you down memory lane, showing you the faded post box, the typewriter and the sewing machine; technology that was once game-changing but totally redundant in our disruptive, fast moving times,” she shares.

ALFAAZ…A TRIBUTE TO CREATION AND DEEP AFFECTION

In August this year, she also staged the launch of her short film, Alfaaz, at Bandra’s Otter’s Club… a tribute to a beautiful equation between her and a secret admirer who frequently messaged her deeply inspiring insights about life, art, love. I couldn’t help ask Sangeeta how this film, with its passionate rendering of hope and strong currents of romance, stood side by side with her married status? “It was entirely a work of the imagination, like my paintings,” she laughed. The film is truly poetic and poignant too; in some ways it magnifies the popular notion that love is often a creation of the imagination more than a real thing; but in this narrative, Sangeeta literally has a deeper palette of emotional colours to paint with… and so love is a vivid presence even in a lover’s absence. More real in fact! As we speak, the film (released by Pocket Films) has been chosen to feature at the Scarab Short Film Festival, staged in the UAE.

WHAT NEXT?

The end of 2022 has been heady. Not only is Sangeeta feeling a sense of fullfillment having contributed to Maximum City directly as an artist, but she is also excited about new installations to feature at the international airport of Mumbai, (which is possibly the richest public art space we know of in the city today). What will she be doing this time? Let’s wait and watch!