Chennai: A quintessential Tamil tradition of making auspicious floor designs outside homes with rice powder has now been used to make a bold feminist statement by a young Chennai artist.
The kolam, as the doorway design is called in Tamil, is ubiquitous in Tamil Nadu. It is drawn at dawn outside the threshold of homes as an invitation to Lakshmi. For Berlin-based digital artist Samyukta Madhu, the notion of thresholds is deeply political for women.
From Ramayana’s Sita to modern-day women in India, the home is considered a safe space. Beyond the threshold of the home lies danger.
‘The female body is my canvas’
Madhu took the white kolam design and imprinted it on the dark-skinned chest of a Tamil woman, as well as the back of a nude female figure. She then mounted these images on giant LED screens.
“I grew up in Tamil Nadu seeing kolam outside homes and temples. It marks a border zone that is meant to denote a safe space,” Madhu said at the opening of a new exhibition titled ‘Reincarnations – Ghosts of a South Asian Past’ in Chennai. “So, I put the kolam on a woman’s body. The female body is my canvas. For women, these doorsteps can be safe and limiting, security and a burden.”
With that, she brings together the female body and the body politic.
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Subverting and celebrating tradition
Samyukta Madhu’s art subverts as well as celebrates tradition – a tightrope act that she knows only too well as she navigates her twin identities. The 29-year-old CGI artist divides her time between Chennai, where she was born and raised, and Berlin, where she now works. This is Madhu’s first solo show in India, following displays in Berlin and Paris. The body of work at this exhibition, she said, is a “liaison between her two selves”.
Her collection of seven stunning artworks is featured at the exhibit – mounted as canvas and on 12-foot digital screen installations. In each of them, Madhu triangulates tradition and technology on a Tamil woman’s body. Her starting point was grainy, colonial-era, black-and-white photographs of dark-skinned Tamil women from India and Sri Lanka. She used digital technology and CGI characters – modelled in 3D programmes – to alter their jewellery, facial expressions and clothing to transform them into powerful assertions of unapologetic femininity.
In one artwork, she adorned a woman’s body with jewellery that had protruding spikes. She titled it The Warrior.
“I have turned her jewellery into armour and weaponry,” Madhu said. The exhibition opening at the patio of The Collage, Chennai was attended by mostly women. And the jaw-dropping images provided a fertile backdrop for their selfies and reels.
Many said they recognised the familiar Tamil motifs but marvelled at the artist’s reinvention of tradition.
“She’s taking tradition and projecting it onto a digital future. The past and the future are beautiful. The problem is in the present, our present,” said Bhagya Sivaraman, an artist and jewellery designer. “She is time-travelling with her art.”
Much like the kolam, Madhu also pierces metallic Tamil alphabets onto the woman’s body in an artwork called The Priest.
“She has these Tamil letters emerging out of her skin. She is doing puja and the shlokas [verses] come out of her body,” she said. “I am inspired by science fiction characters.”
Through her celebration of dark skin, she said she seeks to reverse the deep colourism embedded in Indian standards of beauty. Had colonisation not occurred, would the colour complex have lasted this long, she asks. Her work, she says, is at once feminist and anti-colonial.
“The photographs were all shot by male British colonisers. They were looking at these women as passive colonial subjects. I wanted to reinterpret them as the main characters and project them on massive screens in such a way that we are looking up to them. I wanted them to exude power and authority,” she said.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)