Princess Pea: Not completely Grimm

Haven't we all grown up reading and listening to fantastical stories of dragons and dungeons, witches and beasts, princes and beauties? Of course, fairytales have enchanted us all! They are miraculous and beautiful, and their potency lies in them being mystified. Fairytales are but a historical prescription, intended to allay young minds of fear and condition them to know the ways of their society. They are also strong indicators of the level of civilisation, of the essential quality of a culture. So what happens when these tales are subverted to question the exact same notions they were invented to preserve?

The feminist artist who goes by the name of her alter-ego Princess Pea, drawn from Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale of the Princess and the Pea, presents her first solo exhibit in the city titled Pecked, Jostled and Teased. Constantly mocked for her petite frame while growing up, the young artist introspected on the physical attributes that society sanctioned and deemed 'beautiful'. Who could be a little princess and what did it take for all little girls to be like her? With the plethora of fashion magazines and beauty paraphernalia feeding our understanding of womanhood, Princess Pea attempts to expose the hypocrisy of the gender bias.

Princess Pea is in her early 30s, is of a small frame, and adorns a giant anime inspired head as her own. The head with green pea-like bobbles on either side has become a trademark of her identity, and of a seemingly carefree absurdity. All her work is autobiographical, presented as pop art, making the intended satire even more hard-hitting. Her recent show includes a striking series of mixed media paintings — a compositional fusion of Indian and Mughal miniatures with computer generated video games. There is a detailed logic in her use of each motif — a palace with groomed gardens and many peacocks, a royal prince gazing from a balcony; the balcony contrived as another level for the gamer to clear and by extension, another standard to aspire to. I look closer to find Stan and Kenny from the sitcom South Park in a battle scene, as a reference to the dark humour they stand for, and an insight into her lived reality. The green bobbles emerge again, like amorphous blobs, that converge to form the top of a tree or fragments of a meteoric shower, commanded by Princess Pea to destroy all forms of patriarchy that assign the woman a place of second gender. 

A wall mounted with seven found stuffed toys represents the once friends and pets of the children who owned them; each with an oversized faceless head, each discarded after the fallacy of their companionship was realised. Alongside is a series of eight wooden dolls, allegedly modeled along Princess Pea's physical type, displayed inside glass cylinders as specimens of strong personalities taken from mythology and reality — Draupadi, Marjane Satrapi, The Red Queen, Mary Kom, Yoko Ono, Anya, Barbara Thornson and Ottoline. Their projected identities are representations of strength and respect, for which each is revered and admired. In doing so, the artist insinuates the erroneous generalisation of man being the superior gender.

Princess Pea's angst is most felt in the honeycomb shaped room that is sound proofed and fitted with three cameras. The interactive piece urges women to go in and scream, derived from the logic of "making their voices heard". The recording from inside the room is viewed by the Princess in a cordoned-off room of the gallery, where she sits with her enormous white head, dressed in a lacey vintage gown watching quietly. The piece is ambitious to say the least, but in line with an earlier project wherein roles are reversed and she sits in front of the cameras inside the same portable room while others view her activities from the outside.

Princess Pea successfully makes real the fantastical, and in its strange silliness she ridicules the society we live in and its concocted notions of beauty. Yet, she still feels the need to mask her identity as an artist behind anonymity and maintains only her alter-ego persona of Princess Pea in the public domain.

When art meets artificial intelligence

Pradeep Puthoor's art is a confluence of artificial intelligence and biological engineering represented on canvas with vibrant colours and intricate detailing. Adorning the walls of Nature Morte gallery this month is a series of large canvases, executed in the last two years. As I view each, I am transported into a giant chemical reactor comprising metal vessels with the attendant paraphernalia, ranging from tubing and pipes, oozing and bubbling fluid, organic tissue combined with skeletal parts, often against a backdrop of digital codes, metamorphosing into hybrid alien forms of a fantastical dimension. It is an onslaught on the senses, but I suspect that to be the desired reaction from the viewer. Wedged precariously between the real and imagined, Puthoor's works appear to comment on the decadence of urban lifestyle and the human need for mutative technologies. At the same time, the paintings explore emotional underpinnings of fear and anxiety related to man's desire for immortality. With a touch of both surrealistic and futuristic elements, Puthoor's paintings wryly prompt to question our faith in a projected realm of fantasy and science fiction by distorting reality as we know it. 

The exhibition is simply yet aptly titled 'Pradeep Puthoor: New Paintings' and is the Trivandrum-based artist's first major solo show in Delhi, as well as a first showing at Nature Morte. Puthoor's skill as graphic artist and fine draughtsman is evident in each work. Upon close observation I notice an array of tribal motifs, fused and entwined in a modern madness of informatics. There is also a discernable sarcasm in these large and vulgarly bright paintings, which when displayed together create an immersive atmosphere, enveloping the walls and blanketing the onlooker's sight from all else. The visual monotony is broken by the few sculptures by Arun Kumar HG that punctuate the different rooms of the gallery space. Their inclusion here ironically speaks of another level of human relationships with nature, evident in the forms of the revered cow Nandi or that of a juicy oversized watermelon. Out of place and rather disturbing amongst this scheme is Palmscape, one of Mrinalini Mukherjee's marvellously moulded bronze sculptures, which sits atop a pedestal at the far end of the exhibition.

As I survey the gallery, a large triptych in the basement titled Night Watch with Dolls strikes me as hauntingly dark, in colour and form, hung next to a much paler painting titled Temple of Yellow bones. The corner conclave of both these works sums up the exhibit for me, as a meeting of yesterday and tomorrow, of anatomical and robotic compositions, of urban and cosmic spaces.

Confronting past trauma through art

Bad things happen. To everyone. But is it not relative? Is it what you think? This is the question asked by late artist Rummana Hussain in her part-performative work of 1998 and is the title of the exhibition on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. The show explores notions of identity drawn from territory, ethnicity, or gender, placing the viewer within the frame of violence and injustice. Each artist successfully employs art as a means of activism and resistance.

The exhibition opens with a clay head sculpted by Himmat Shah that, according to curator Roobina Karode, evokes the sentiment of the exhibit that is also its subtitle: "Ruminations on time, memory and site." The ambiguity held by the head, and its suggestion of a larger historical context or a more specific excavated site leads to N.N. Rimzon's larger-than-life meditative sculpture, The Inner Voice (1992). Comprising a Jain tirthankara standing in the posture identified with final release from the body, surrounded by a semi-circle of cast iron swords, eloquently resilient to impending harm. To the right is Rummana Hussain's Is It What You Think. On display is a selection of five black and white frames wherein she photographs herself decorated with thick black hair and kohl-lined eyes, emerging from behind black drapes suggestive of the hijab, to question practised conventions of both Islam and of womanhood. Accompanying the images is a framed text of questions directed at the reader, some of which ask: "Have you defined her, slotted her? Does she threaten you?" Powerful as the work is, it poignantly leads to Vivan Sundaram's room-sized installation Memorial (1993-2014) that is based on a photograph taken by the photojournalist Hoshi Lal of a Muslim man killed in the Hindu-Muslim riots that plagued Mumbai in 1992-93. His fallen body leans against a garbage container that in part resembles a coffin and in part stage prop. Within the constructed architecture are displayed versions of the image pierced with iron nails, arranged around a central gateway memorialising the "fallen mortal" and leading squarely to an embalmed and entombed figure.

We are confronted next with another of Rummana Hussain's works, Fragments (1993) and Anita Dube's Illegal (2004-05), the former constructed of broken and shattered earth that mirrors a loss of self, while the latter comprises a set of six lightboxes provocatively illuminating in red disputed ideas of geographical site and dwelling. The implicit undoing suggested by these relics is referenced further in the paper works of Ashim Purkayashtha, in the painted tableaus of Surendran Nair and in the emotive watercolours of Arpita Singh.

Anita Dube's Illegal (2004-05)

Vivan Sundaram, Memorial, (1993- 2014)

Zarina Hashmi and Gulammohammad Sheikh present works that serve as travelogues, that reveal stories through both minimalistic form and painted narration. While Hashmi's works reflect the changing nuances of home and belonging, Sheikh's Kaavad — Ayodhya Mirage (2004) represents a traditional mobile shrine displayed as an accordion book that, like Hussain and Sundaram's art, tells tales from the communal unrest after the Babri demolition.

Amar Kanwar's eight-channel video installation The Lightening Testimonies (2007) is chilling, to say the least. Narrating histories of violence against women, the work is a retelling of human suffering, how it is resisted and overcome. With both passionate and contemplative imagery drawn from cases of civil war in Kashmir to the belligerent protests against the rape of a minor girl in Imphal, I would have assumed this as a rather melancholic end to the exhibition, but its deep engagement with the viewer leaves a strain with which to comprehend the works that follow. Consequently, Navjot Altaf's Lacuna in Testimony (2003), Shilpa Gupta's Someone Else (2011-12) and Idris Khan's God is Great (2011) urge us to think of how we perceive traumatic experiences and how these are recorded or memorised in history. How do we relinquish ourselves from guilt and wherein lies our faith? Do the artworks then serve as universal testimonials of social and cultural victimisation? Furthermore, do they have the power to change or to heal?

Is It What You Think? deserves a visit for both art aficionado and novice, not only for the quality of art exhibited, and the way it is mediated to the public, but also because the issues addressed are current to a country on the brink of new governance, hopeful of a brighter tomorrow.