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.

Dayal captures life at the margins

A photograph tells a story. In fact, it can tell many. The story depends on the temperament of the subject and its context, whether it is a historical document or an image that was contrived or staged. With the barrage of images used for propaganda, manipulated or not, it is difficult to know the difference. Eager to learn more about journalistic photography and its many nuances, I sought out Delhi-based freelance photographer Sumit Dayal, whose images have been featured in magazines like TIME andNational Geographic. How authentic, I asked him, is the image to the story and how does it align with an artist's personal vision?

Sumit Dayal was born in Kashmir and brought up in Nepal, and has focused his work on South Asia and the cultural identities that these regions protract and eschew. Over coffee on an early Monday morning, we discussed his recent visit to New York and the progressive impact that social media has on the future of photography as a documentary medium. The popularity of the smartphone and applications that allow anyone to publish their photographs in three easy steps has made everyone an author. However the speed with which these are uploaded, and the multiplicity of sources, makes the idea of authorship redundant. Having said this, there is a credibility that, say, TIME has built over many years. But how does a magazine cope with the decreasing relevance of print? And how do we react to the changing interface? "Everyone simply adapts," he explains. 

As Dayal travels and camps all over the world, he excavates and documents the psyche of the land as he experiences it, without a prior agenda.

Dayal discovered his interest in photography quite by accident, after a chance apprenticeship with renowned photo-activist Thomas Kelly in Nepal. On his advice, Dayal went on to graduate with a degree in documentary and photo journalism at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2006. With a keen appetite for the thrills of photojournalism, he headed to one of the most dangerous and sensationalised regions of the time — Afghanistan, to cover the war's impact on local populations. The resulting series, titled "Afghanistan, No Strings Attached, 2007" is a compilation of everyday scenes that belie the precision of the camera, for they reflect a reality that is blurry, rough on the edges and often surreal. 

Dayal has since photographed the marginal and immigrant peoples of India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan. But it is his work on Kashmir, personal and ethnographically researched, that won him National Geographic's All Roads Photography Program in 2010. The continuing series, "On Going Home", sketches a personal timeline of observations along the Line of Control, all the way from Punjab to Ladakh. As he travels and camps, he excavates and documents the psyche of the land as he experiences it, without a prior agenda. He explains his inclination toward portraiture as a way to detract from the banality and blandness of the landscape, consequently accenting a specific emotion that is focused within the frame of the composition. Begun in 2009, Dayal's work in Kashmir is ongoing, and has the potential of remaining a historical record of our times.

As we come full circle to where our conversation began, Dayal informs me of his latest initiative called The India Photo Project, formed on the mobile photo-sharing platform Instagram. Fed by submissions from select Indian photographers, the collective aims to record the visual evolution of life and living in the world's largest democracy, wherein each image documents and relays strong voices in a manner that is both unbiased and free. As a new follower, I too am fed a daily dose of stunning and poignant images, along with many others, that still raise the question of how true the photograph is to the reality it attempts to capture.

Parul Gupta masters space and time

Parul Gupta has always perceived the world linearly, having fretted over why she saw things skewed and constantly repositioning herself so that she perceived lines in parallel. Upon deeper contemplation, she realised that this tendency was more than an innocent tic, and decided to use it to guide her art practice.

Parul was born into a business family and decided to study commerce, plunging herself into the marketplace of bulls and bears. Within a few years, she quit it all and gave her aesthetic eye a chance to train by opting to study art at the Nottingham Trent University, from where she graduated in 2011.

In the two or so weeks prior to my scheduled studio visit, I studied her art and made a short list of questions, but the fact that I could not fully grasp her work bothered me to no extent. Gupta intends her art to be experiential, observing closely the geometry of built environments and tweaking the viewer's perception in order to question the ways we see the world, how we abstract the same through art. Her rationale, she says, is that she wants the viewer to move around her work and not statically observe it. Her statement on her practice clarifies this rather aptly: "How can a spatial drawing change our perception of each individual space, as well the perception of ourselves in that space?" This is also how she imagines animation, frame to frame, drawn or modelled so as to make the viewer move while following the narration in the piece, instead of the other way around. 

Gupta’s artistic interventions either involve the inhabitation of a physical space or initiating an interaction between different planes and, by extension, different habitats.

Having begun with big coloured paintings, Gupta's minimalist aesthetic came to the fore while still at university. Observing her hair fall every day, she decided to collect strands and animate their fall in a video, succinctly titled Hairfall. This initial exploration of a basic line, choreographed to behave anew in a constructed environment, was only the beginning. 

Her paintings explore the role of a basic line within a constructed environment. 

Gupta's artistic interventions are mostly site-specific, either involving the inhabitation of a physical space or initiating an interaction between different planes and, by extension, different habitats, drawn or photographed in the space. The drawings displayed at her solo show at the Visual Arts Gallery of the India Habitat Centre in 2012 were static representations and configurations of the line drawn in pen. However, it was the space offered at NIV Studios in Delhi that same year, and her decision to photograph elements of its interiors in shadow and light and from variant angles, that allowed her to experiment with site specificity. She displayed these juxtaposed to the element itself, two-dimensional against three-dimensional, slowly morphing together, extending or limiting space. She furthered this interest in successive participations in "Sarai Reader 09" at the Devi Art Foundation, 2012, KONA's "Alternative Space", 2013 and Khoj's "PEERS 2013".

Parul's need to break the normative aesthetic of the space has been largely motivated by an intuitive compulsion to fracture the "implied line" (assumed way of aligning or seeing) within a geometrical construction, in her case mostly architectural constructs. Her more recent works attempt at breaking the geometrical form — for now, the grid or square. Privy to these works at her studio, it's unnerving, yet somehow charming, to experience the artist's spontaneous piloting of disassociating relations between forms in order to re-condition and construe perception in a more sublime manner. It makes me wonder how her intended interactions with mathematicians and architects will contribute or change the dialogue.

The Dreamcatcher's private collection

Akash Gaur, 28, claims to be a dreamer, apparently born to a family of dreamers, whose mealtime chats revolved around sharing bizarre escapades from the world of their subconscious. Being whacked by a cricket bat while also being bitten by a crazed dog, discovering a giant tattoo of Ravana inked across his teeth after a visit to the dentist, or waking to discover his hands are giant magnets that attract only cats are just a few dreams I saw illustrated at Akash's studio earlier this week. Weird? Sure. But then again, aren't all dreams weird? Doesn't the mind play the strangest tricks? What fascinated me the most wasn't what he dreamt, but the fact that he remembered a fair number of his dreams, meticulously documented in his journal, and recalled each as compositions that he then illustrated on paper.

Akash can sleep anywhere and at anytime. Whenever he cannot, he informs me, a book is all that's needed. So he doesn't read, preferring instead to watch TV and additionally being fed a steady supply of mythological fables and stories from his wife, who is very religious. As he mentions this, he points to a drawing framed behind us with a figure of Lord Ganesha sitting beside a smiling character from some manga series, something he alleges he has never watched or read before. As we go through more drawings, and consequently more dreams, I ask where he'd get the inspiration to draw if his dreams suddenly stopped. Would he stop making art? Of course not, comes his sharp reply. 

Gaur confesses that he does play around with a dream’s image many times over, reading his journal often, but never imagines another way to represent the same dream.

Apocalypse is a project he initiated in 2012, asking family, friends, neighbours, vendors he works with and random passers-by what they made of the Mayan calendar prediction of the end of the world. Their replies are recorded as drawings, reproduced and compiled in an artist book, each person's contribution imagined as a different visual. Gaur is also working on another such book, based on the changes he has seen ever since he left his village in Haryana for Delhi five years ago, a surprisingly common source of inspiration for young artists making a similar migration. Image 2nd

As we chat, I notice a repetition of a single image, experimented with on different scales and in various mediums — pen and ink, laser-cut drawings on paper, acrylic on canvas. Gaur confesses that he does play around with a dream's image many times over, reading his journal often, but never imagines another way to represent the same dream. He prefers not to use colour (until now!), often places himself in his compositions, and sometimes inverts his drawings so that the bottom half is formed as a mirror image of the top half. He sleeps in the day and is curiously observant of everything around him, as he believes these impressions impact his subconscious mind, surreptitiously feeding his dreams. When not sleeping, dreaming or drawing, Akash dabbles in making film props with a group of friends from design school. This and other project commissions, like the 25-foot sculpture of a turban carved with jharokhas framed in the newly-opened Terminal 2 at Mumbai airport, help sustain his art practice. So far, he has been part of a few group exhibitions at Lado Sarai's Exhibit 320, Sarai's Open Studio at Devi Art Foundation and at last year's edition of the United Art Fair, but hopes to be able to show more. His art does have a long way to evolve but cannot do so in isolation.

I have often wondered on the limited exposure afforded by galleries to young artists, for whom it is imperative to interact with others in the field in order to be able to grow and build a healthy dialogue. Nevertheless, I feel optimistic about Akash Gaur's work, perhaps because it enlivens dreams and features a world of eccentricity filled with all things peculiar, yet never unpleasant. It is certainly a respite from our world, what with its crashing planes, epidemics, hunger and endless war.