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The Iconic Contemporary Female Artist Of The Age: Bharti Kher

by Guest Author 08/12/2024

written by Guest Author

By Srishti Sarraf

Bharti Kher is the most recognizable name in the contemporary art world who is continuously redefining the meaning of life through her masterpieces. Her work primarily encompasses a wide array of art forms including painting, sculpture, collage, photography, and installation, often incorporating found materials, using them to transform objects and dissolve the distinction between two and three dimensions. Her use of found objects is informed by her position as an artist located between geographic and social milieus. Her way of working is exploratory: surveying, looking, collecting, and transforming, as she repositions the viewer’s relationship with the object and initiates a dialogue between metaphysical and material pursuits. In essence, her art gives form to quotidian life and its daily rituals in a way that reassesses and transforms their meaning to yield an air of magical realism. She has exhibited globally enjoying solo shows in New Delhi, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam, among other cities.

Early Life

Born and brought up in London this iconic artist is in fact of Indian origin currently settled in the national capital New Delhi. Having done a foundation course in Art & Design from Newcastle Polytechnic, United Kingdom (1988-91) she is also an alumnus of Middlesex Polytechnic, Cat Hill, London, United Kingdom (1987-88) where she has trained herself in painting. Thus, her artworks affirm her position as a trans-cultural artist, drawing experiences from both her British and Indian roots. Western upbringing in modern Indian society is inevitably entwined into her ethnographic observations of contemporary Indian life.

In a conversation, when asked about her choice of studying art she commented “I think people were very surprised when we said we’re going to art school.” She further explained “All my cousins, friends, the people that we knew growing up as Asians are all doctors, accountants, lawyers, this is what Asian children did. If you were the first generation in the UK, you had to be a professional,” highlighting the conventional mindset of Asian immigrants.

A Toss Of Coin That Has Changed Her Life

It was in the year 1992 when at the tender age of 23 she moved back to India from the United Kingdom, having not set foot on Indian soil for almost twenty years becoming a rare reverse émigré. However, putting down the roots in India was not her contemplated call. She wanted to travel when she graduated and she chose between New York and New Delhi with a toss of a coin as she revealed “I had no intention of staying in India; I just thought I’m going to travel around the country.”

However, this visit has changed her life. Just after a few weeks, she met another best known contemporary artist of the time, Subodh Gupta, who turns out to be her life partner alongside her biggest supporter and admirer. Commenting about her art career in the country she added “The first 10 or 15 years were really very hard like any practising artist now. To decide to be an artist takes a lot of courage because there are years of rejection and a lot of loneliness.” It is true also as in India a serious lack of governmental support to art institutions can be seen.

Ultimately, her art career began to take off in 2006 when she made a life-sized female Indian elephant that was awe-inspiring in its scale, detail and beauty called The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, this sculpture was one of the most iconic and talked-about works of art. After this there was no looking back for her, she has frequently exhibited worldwide getting wide-reaching fame. Her accolade includes The Sanskriti Award (2003), YFLO Woman Achiever of the Year (2007), ARKEN Art Prize (2010) and the highest French cultural award, Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) (2015) which she received for her contribution to the landscape of contemporary art, both in France and internationally.

Themes, Style & Patterns That Makes Her Unique

The fact that her work is informed by her own experience of growing up as a British-born Indian makes her unique. Close analysis of her works show that her work is autobiographical in dimension and attempts to express the view of an outsider looking in. She has emerged as an artist of importance in the open era with her multi-disciplined work in sculpture, photography and painting as she questions issues of personal identity, its societal dynamics and roles and the context of Indian traditions and culture; this while correlating to the contemporary concerns dealing with genetics, evolution, technology and ecology. Her rare style to inquire is her artistic attempt to seek answers and challenge these concepts creatively and productively. Thus, the questions of her own identity, her place, the meaning of home and culture in different ways are part and parcel of her work. Her body of work is diverse and from the materials she uses to artistic sensibilities to the subjects, she is known for her vast assortment of a subject that defines her aesthetic but she keeps the repeating patterns and the gestures constant throughout her work. She primarily engages with issues of migration, identity, femininity, sexuality, social roles, traditional rituals, gender relationships and popular culture of India, both past and present and her artworks are a depiction of scrutiny of these themes from her unique vantage point. Her figurative paintings spoke loud of the Indian patriarchal society from a feminine perspective, starkly represented in her compositions of Indian interiors.

One of her favourite materials is “bindi”- traditionally a mark of pigment applied to the forehead associated with the Hindu symbol of the third eye and over the last two decades, she has come to use it repeatedly as a “code, a text, a membrane and skin.” Notably, she has appropriated the bindi in all its various shapes, colours and forms to create complex works that are visually mesmerizing, technically time-consuming and conceptually multi-layered and her appropriation of the bindi has promoted it to the status of icon, an instantly recognizable symbol of and for the artist. Another thread that can be seen through her work is the idea of the “body” as the female body, its ageing and its processes, has been her leitmotif through the decades.

Thus, there is much to explore about her and to sum up her artistic journey one must use her words as she said “If I could remake my artistic career, I think I would be a minimalist painter. All the art that I love comes from the tradition of reduction—but I can’t because I’m super-maximum!”

08/12/2024 0 comments 27 views

Politics of Body: Part One- Female Body

by Satakshi Malaviya 08/12/2024

written by Satakshi Malaviya

By Satakshi Malviya

Today’s feminist discourse often criticises age old Indian societal cliché- ‘boys should not cry and girls should not laugh loudly in public’. The term ‘politics of body’ constitutes two concepts in which the first concept ‘politics’ signifies the power or power relation and ‘body’ signifies the human body on which this power is exercised. Together it simply means the creation, regulation and control of human body by the power at different degrees in a society- it is cultural or social or any other type of control. Michel Foucault, a French philosopher and political activist, points out that the body is produced through power rather than what it is called ‘naturally formed’ and bodies are controlled and subjugated through certain techniques in the mechanism of the society. The body of the baby, whether it’s a male or a female, while growing up undergoes several subtle societal mechanism of behavioural control. This simply forces them to adopt specific sets of attributes following the strict generalised norms which are produced by ‘relations of power’ to tie up the body with certain behaviour and roles. The motive behind is “Control over body” and this is politics of body. It’s not only the female and transperson bodies which are controlled but also the male bodies.
Here, this part focuses on female body, since they have remained the prey of societal control to maintain general norms of sexuality and male supremacy. It is this societal mechanism which also creates, defines and pressurizes to maintain the notions like ‘female purity’. Foucault believes that sexuality is not a natural quality of the body but rather the effect of specific power relations.
It is important to understand the position of “essentialism” regarding ‘body’ to understand the ‘politics of body’ in which the meaning of women body has been naturalized. Essentialism believes that there are properties essential to women and shared by all the women. Essentialism is similar to providing a universal stand that these properties are common to all women and are essential to be a woman at all. It becomes a feminist concern because if these properties are shared by all women and are necessary to be one, then it can be identified that these are natural properties. Thus, women’s necessary properties are identified as biological. Feminist Alison Stone points out that essentialism views that:
“all women are constituted as women by their possession of wombs, breasts, and child-bearing capacity.”
The second wave feminists criticized this view, among them, the socialist feminists argued by bringing in the ‘social constructionism’ which relies on the distinction between natural sex and constructed gender. This is mainly the sociological approach to gender. The sex-gender distinction is an attempt by feminists to solve the theoretical problem and develop an understanding that gender is not derived from the natural body.

Alison Stone (1991) points out that Judith Butler, Moira Gatens, and Elizabeth Grosz, these thinkers argued that ‘our bodies are first and foremost the bodies that we live and the way we live our bodies is culturally informed and constrained at every point. Consequently, one cannot appeal to any unity amongst female bodies to fix the definition of women, since the meaning of bodies will vary indefinitely according to their socio-cultural location’.

Foucault, a post structuralist, denied the present structural meaning and position of the body/bodies. Foucault first makes use of the notion of the body in the essay, “Neitzsche, Genealogy, History” where he criticized traditional form of history on two grounds: a) as it is dominated by certain metaphysical concepts and totalizing assumptions derived from the philosophy of the subject; b) events are inserted in universal explanatory schemas and linear structures and are given false unity and are reduced to their essential traits or final meaning; which leads to deprive them of their own singularity and immediacy. By this explanation of Foucault it can be understood that how the myth of immutable meaning of female bodies and female qualities is structured and maintained. This is the display and fixation of monotonous pattern for a female body according to which it acts throughout the life.

Foucault (1984) points out that history is read to reconfirm one’s present sense of identity and any potentially disruptive awareness of alterity is suppressed. If you try to opt any alternate pattern to live then you will be suppressed. History is based on the constant struggle of warfare between different power blocks which attempt to impose their own system of domination and Foucault places the human body at the centre of this struggle between different power formations. McNay (1991) further points out the Foucault’s explanation of body:

“As the center of the struggle for domination, the body is both shaped and reshaped by the different warring forces acting upon it. The body bears the marks, the “stigmata of past experience,” upon its surface; “The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy as an analysis of descent is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the processes of history’s destruction of the body” (Foucault 1984,83).”

Here, Foucault insisted on the body as historically and culturally specific entity. The most important contribution that Foucault’s theory of the body has made to feminist thought is to provide a way of conceiving of the body as a concrete phenomenon without merging its materiality with a fixed biological essence, for example: if she gives birth that does not mean that this biological function would further fix roles for her and limit her.

Initially, on a fundamental level, a notion of body is central to feminist analysis of the oppression of women because the large structure of gender inequality is built and legitimated upon the biological difference between male and female bodies. This structure, in patriarchal society, has naturalized that women are inferior to men and legitimized it with reference to biology, and the fact that women were attached to some biological functions. This simply means that an accepted notion was: sex is impacting gender and gender inequalities are the result of natural sex difference. This is how the politics of female body can be traced, for example: cooking and nursing has been naturalized as women’s job; girls have been attached to particular occupations like babysitter, nurse, cooks; even if the brother is younger then also it is the duty of the elder sister to serve water and food to him or talk to him with respect, even if the sister is younger than also she is expected to cook rather than elder brother who actually can cook at lower risk etc.

Within some types of feminists this is argued that the notion of natural sexual difference does not explain gender inequalities rather the natural body is used as a central tool in the strategies of oppression and to naturalize certain type of treatment to female body. Patriarchal logic uses sex to make oppressive systems obvious, as Monique Plaza puts “it is not the sex that gives shape to the social, it is because the social that is able to make sexual forms”.

For example the female sex has been given feminine characteristics through diverse social practices- grand celebration of first day of first menstrual cycle of a girl restricts her from certain outdoor activities, attires and friend circle. These bodies are controlled and framed in such a structure, in a patriarchal society, which further leads to imprisoning fit these bodies in a particular meaning of purity/female purity and then women are asked to maintain it. For example: parents often teach their daughters – a female body should not laugh loudly or should not widely open leg while sitting in public place otherwise she is considered a characterless body who is seducing male body. The question is why such ‘purity’? And even if it is then- Is purity only expected from female? Is male impurity more acceptable than female one?

Living in a city and reading this may make these words look a little outdated but what about those ‘female bodies’ which are part and parcel of non-metropolitan area? Even in cities the ‘politics of body’ exists in more modernized fashion. The term ‘gender’ must be questioned if we quench for equality. Why this generalization for control? The body must be celebrated without loading it with roles and attributes & accepting it with its beautiful unique identity which must develop naturally instead of artificial societal naturalization. The body should be treated as just the ‘body’. The fight is still on. The next part reflects light upon politics of transperson body and debate related to idea of sex as natural.

08/12/2024 0 comments 26 views

Confronting Marginalization of the LGBTQ+ Community

by Guest Author 08/12/2024

written by Guest Author

By Samiksha Jain

Despite being the world’s largest constitutional democracy, India continues to struggle with heteronormative constraints that undermine different sexualities. For many years, the LGBTQ community has been at odds. The government’s main slogan has been to secure this community through justice, equity, and harmony. Previously, the LGBTQ community was known to simply include the gay community, but it eventually expanded to encompass different sorts of homosexuals. Discrimination against this minority has grown frequent; they have been separated and estranged from society, and they have been denied the basic fundamental rights to which they are entitled as Indian citizens. The rights of this group have recently been recognized, and the judiciary has intervened to preserve them.

As of today, members of the community do not have any special legal rights. They are allowed by law to participate in consensual sexual activity because criminalizing it would be a violation of their fundamental rights. As a result, the scope of their rights has to be understood to be the same Fundamental Rights that citizens in this country have. However, members of the community, still do not have access to all the civil rights that citizens of India enjoy. For example, they are unable to legally register their marriages, as their union is not recognized by Indian law.

The landmark judgment of Navtej Singh v. Union of India (AIR 2018 SC 4321) was a breakthrough for the members of this community. On September 6, 2018, a five-judge panel unanimously declared Section 377 of Indian Penal Code as unconstitutional. The existence of a law that criminalized consensual sexual intercourse between adults was held to be violative of Article 14, 15, 19, and 21 of the Indian Constitution and also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Court went on to say that all community members are entitled to all of the Constitution’s guarantees, including equal citizenship and protection from discrimination.

Indian Constitution and LGBTQ+ Community

Justice — social, economic, and political equality of status – is enshrined in the Indian Constitution’s preamble. In essence, the Indian Constitution is sex-blind, which means that the underlying assumption of equality is based on a constitutional mandate that the gender of an individual is irrelevant unless where the Constitution demands special provisions for everyone.

Right to Equality

Within the territory of India, Article 14 of the Constitution guarantees everyone equal standing before the law and equal protection under the law. The term “any person” here refers to any human, with no discrimination based on caste, creed, religion, sex, or any other category. The interpretation of the word “person” was broadened in the case of National Legal Service Authority v. Union of India (AIR 2014 SC 1863), and it was held that Article 14 of the Indian Constitution does not limit the word “person” and its application solely to males and females. Hijras/transgender people who are neither male nor female fit within the definition of “person” and are thus entitled to legal protection in all spheres of State activity, including healthcare, education, employment as well as equal civil and citizenship rights, as enjoyed by any other citizen of this country.

Equality of Opportunity and Right against all forms of Discrimination

Articles 15 and 16 prohibit discrimination against any citizen on a list of grounds, which includes the bottom of the word “sex.” In fact, both Articles prohibit all forms of gender bias and discrimination based on gender. Sex has two separate components: gender and biological characteristics. Gender qualities include one’s character, the underlying psychological or emotional sense of sexual identity and character, as well as biological aspects such as genitals, chromosomes, and secondary sexual features. As a result, the discrimination on the bottom of ‘sex’ under Articles 15 and 16, includes discrimination on the bottom of identity.

Right to Life and Personal Liberty

The right to life is one of the most basic fundamental rights, and no one, including the government, has the capacity to violate or revoke it. The right to select one’s own identity is one of the most important rights under this article to living with dignity, according to the case of I.R. Coelho v. State of Tamil Nadu (AIR 2007 SC 861). One of the most essential features of Article 21 of the Indian Constitution is the right to a dignified existence for transgender people. Non-recognition violates their right to dignity; hence they need full rights to specify and live their lives without fear.

Right against Exploitation

Various inhuman activities, such as human trafficking and beggary, have been designated as offences and are punishable under Article 23 of the Indian Constitution. The scope of Article 23 is extraordinarily broad because it encompasses any sort of prejudice that is prohibited. Transgender people are the worst victims of exploitation; because of their low socioeconomic standing, they engage in prostitution and other immoral acts, which society considers unacceptable. The goal of this article is to protect the independence of a person’s identity by prohibiting men from exploiting men.

Additionally, the Indian legal framework’s failure to recognize the “Third Gender” has resulted in systematic denial of equal protection under the law and pervasive socio-economic discrimination in society and in Indian workplaces. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 was recently enacted by the Indian parliament in response to the NALSA judgment.

As defined in the Act, ‘transgender’ refers to and includes all individuals whose gender does not conform or match the gender assigned to them at birth, including trans-man and trans-woman (whether or not they have undergone sex reassignment surgery (‘SRS’) and individuals with socio-cultural identities such as ‘kinner’, ‘hijra’, ‘aravani’ and ‘jogta’. Below is the list of rights that this act guarantees.

Prohibition against discrimination of transgender individuals: It prohibits discrimination against transgender individuals in the following areas: (i) education; (ii) employment; (iii) healthcare; (iv) access to, or enjoyment of, goods, facilities, or opportunities available to the general public; (v) right to movement; (vi) right to reside, rent, or otherwise occupy property; and (vii) opportunity to hold public or private official positions.
Certificate of identity for a transgender person: A transgender person can apply to the District Magistrate for a certificate of identity with the gender “transgender” written on it. Only if the person has surgery to change their gender, whether male or female, may they get an updated certificate.
Right of residence: Every transgender person has the right to live in his or her own home and be included in his or her family. If the transgender person’s immediate family is unable to care for them, a competent court may order that they be placed in a rehabilitation center.
Education: Without discrimination, educational institutions supported or recognized by the appropriate government must provide inclusive education, sports, and recreational facilities for transgender people.
Employment: In issues of employment, including recruiting and advancement, no government or commercial institution can discriminate against a transgender person.
Health care: The government must take efforts to ensure that transgender people have access to health care, including specialized HIV surveillance centers and sex reassignment surgery. The government will revise medical curriculum to meet transgender people’s health concerns and provide comprehensive medical insurance plans for them.
Welfare measures by the government: It declares that the appropriate government will take steps to ensure transgender people’s full inclusion and engagement in society. It must also take steps to save and rehabilitate them, provide vocational training and self-employment, develop transgender-sensitive policies, and encourage their involvement in cultural events.
Offences and penalties: It recognize the following transgender-related offenses: (i) forced or bonded labor (excluding compulsory government service for public purposes), (ii) denial of access to public places, (iii) removal from the household and village, and (iv) physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, or economic abuse. The penalties for these offenses range from six months to two years in prison, as well as a fine.

Now, the significant question needs to be asked is: Is this law sufficient and fulfilling their purpose? The answer lies in the vehement unacceptance of this law by the members of LGBTQ+ community. When community members are dissatisfied with the laws that control them, good lawmaking and execution becomes difficult. This Act exemplifies the importance of consulting the citizens of the community for whom these laws are being enacted. A transgender person must file an application to the District Magistrate for a certificate of identity as a transgender person, according to this Act. This rule not only hinders self-determination, but it also ignores people who identify as non-binary or gender-neutral.

The country’s transgender population was dissatisfied with these parts of it at the time, claiming that they were discriminatory. They have waged a vigorous campaign against the Act. Again, ensuring that legislation are gender-neutral is one method to fix this. In the event when a specific segment of society, such as women, requires greater protection, new laws have been enacted to safeguard their interests. The LGBT community, too, needs to be uplifted. As a result, it is critical that new laws be enacted to protect their rights, and that they be consistent with current laws to avoid unintentional discrimination amongst communities or groups.

Samiksha Jain, a third-year student at Institute of Law Nirma University, Ahmedabad.

08/12/2024 0 comments 23 views

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