ART EXHIBITION

RELOCATING MASCULINITIES
AN EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND VIDEO ART
DECEMBER 4 - 14, 2007
IN COLLABORATION WITH
SCHOOL OF ARTS & AESTHETICS
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY, NEW DELHI

CURATED BY | MOHD. AHMAD SABIH,
RAHUL DEV, SRINAYANI & T. SANATHANAN
EXHIBITION COORDINATOR | SHUKLA SAWANT

ORGANISED BY | AAKAR

AN EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND VIDEO ART
ATUL BHALLA
BV SURESH
KRITI ARORA
RAMESHWAR BROOTA
SHEBA CHHACHHI
SUNIL GUPTA

Masculinities in the space of art

Masculinity cannot enter discourse on art, if art is understood as apolitical. The art institutional space is highly constructed and masculine in nature, determined by nationalist and modernist forces. Traditional art history as a discipline centres on men, whether as artists or patrons. In locating art history, curatorial practices and institutions as masculine, would one view art-practice itself as masculine? With this we arrive at the area to be explored in this project. It revolves around the overlapping of art-practices with masculinities.

‘Masculinity’ is a gender practice through which we ‘experience and perform our lives and bodies’. Its socio-cultural and political importance cannot be overstated. This exhibition begins with the need to explore its significance within art practice. Photography in India began as a colonial tool of domination, to serve classificatory, categorising functions, as in anthropology and ethnography. The anxiety to record, capture and possess can be located in its origins in coloniality. Photography, in its earliest avatar, was a masculine agent. Not only was the photographer male, but very often, the space to be photographed was also masculine. It functioned to serve the interests of masculine institutions and disciplines. Photography exists along the binaries constructed by traditional art history, between the social and the aesthetic, high and popular. It is only recently that both Art History and the ‘art market’ have awakened to the possibilities of the photograph. For long, art history has evinced little interest in the journey of photography from
the colonial and elite to being fetishised and ritualised within the popular. However, even when photography was no longer an event, the ordinary was still transformed into the extraordinary by the process of being captured and preserved. Art practice takes off from precisely this potential to explore the versatility of the photographic medium and its subversive possibilities.

Between image making and taking, photography has overlapped into and asserted its presence within painting and sculpture, the more traditional media of Indian art. There has been a parallel intrusion of painterly techniques within photography, while video has emerged as a new medium of art practice, not merely as an extension of the photographic space. Despite photography staking a claim to being an independent medium in the context of art practice, the boundaries between the mediums appear increasingly blurred.

All the artists exhibiting their photographic work in this exhibition identify themselves as art practitioners. As a curatorial exercise, we find that some of these artists have had a long term engagement with certain aspects of masculinity. However, we include also artists in whose work masculinity is a subtext. Despite differing approaches, they all somehow reflect the pernicious influence of masculinities as a lived and impinging reality.

Our intention in bringing them together in a common place is to compile a visual text that highlights the visible/invisible presence of masculinity. Masculinity is confined within socially constructed signs of gender. Signs of masculinity operate within popular modes of practice. One could define the space of art too as a site for the potential contestation of masculinities. We refer to the site of art not in its clichéd position of ‘high’ versus ‘low’, but as a space containing within it transgressive, transformative possibilities. Within popular masculinity, patterns of representation emerge around stereotypes, often restricted to hegemonic forms of masculinity. ‘Desired’ masculinity as constituted by mainstream cinema posters, advertising, popular photography, comic strips, and popular fiction among others, represents a perpetuation of these accepted notions of a dominant ideology.

The photographs and video work that form this exhibition locate themselves in spaces between, beyond and outside of stereotypes. They render suspect all established ideas of masculinity, finding it to be always in a state of transformation. These images mark a shift in locating masculinity outside of a hegemonic assertion, in terms of gaze, sexuality or the representation of the male body itself. Most of the participating artists, whether consciously or involuntarily, have been probing and questioning the structures informed by this ideology, traversing the space between the desired and the unrepresented. However, there is an intervention of the popular within the space of art, as in the juxtapositions constructed by Sunil Gupta, of the self and the popular, or the Bollywood hunk referenced by Sheba Chhachhi in ‘Warrior/Saint’. For BV Suresh the popular emerges as a shared archive in ‘Retakes of the Shadow’, and as a quiet interrogation by Kriti Arora in some of her images. Atul Bhalla explores the space of popular ritual in his work, but represents it in non-populist terms. There occurs a parallel appropriation of the ‘art work’ within the realm of the ‘popular’. Although the two operate in different spaces, there is often a straying over to the ‘other’ side. What emerges is not so much a binary as a negotiable difference, in terms of space, intention and representation.

This exhibition poses a patriarchal, hegemonic, homogenous ‘masculinity’ in opposition to more ambivalent, fluid spaces encompassed in a plural conception of masculinities, less dependent on gender or the male body.

The Body as a Site of Art Practise

The female body is located as a site for the exercise of masculinity, where its contestation can begin, whether passively, in the space to be photographed, or in earnest in the act of representation itself. The male body is unavoidably present, whether physically or spectrally. However, the idea of masculinity slowly extends itself beyond the male body to include the space it is framed in.

Feminist discourse constructed masculinity as the other of the feminine. The relocation of masculinities was shaped by feminist interventions against the patriarchal order. This contestation located masculinity within the paradigm of manliness, muscularity, domination, and power, institutionalised within the ideologies of patriarchy. Masculinities as a social practice is determined by the intersection of race, religion, class, caste and gender. In the context of social reconfigurations, masculinity is a constantly shifting space, with the multiple masculinities, locked in a conflict ridden, hierarchical power relations.
The social positioning of masculinities often takes place through bodily articulations.

It is through articulation or performance that the body enters into the social domain, and is inscribed with its experiences. The body is articulated as a tool of domination/ subordination, and also becomes, as Foucault asserts, the ‘site’ in which all forms of repression are ultimately registered. The construction of masculinity through bodily performance means that its power is vulnerable if the performance cannot be sustained.

Central to this articulation is the gaze. The politics of seeing is related to the politics of being, and masculinity is caught between being and becoming. Masculinity is thus fluid and interchangeable, and a more potent question than, what is masculinity? would be, when does something become masculine?
Much of the work exhibited here overtly or obliquely deals with the body, questioning the positioning of masculinity within the body. Sunil Gupta, for instance, interposes the image of his own body between the popular and the marginal. Sheba Chhachhi counterposes an anonymous torso, with fragments of a popular hegemonic body impinging on it, and the bust of the Buddha. Kriti Arora explores the female body in relation to the male and the masculine institution. Rameshwar Broota’s work is located in the body or parts of it, in lingering detail. Atul Bhalla documents it as the location of an act, a ritual. BV Suresh refers to the body as witness or agent of violence. Masculinity is a quality that is ubiquitous, yet unaccountable. As an object of knowledge, it is always ‘masculinity-in-relation’; framed by the spaces it inhabits.
Mohd. Ahmad Sabih / Rahul Dev / Srinayani /T. Sanathanan

NOTE ON ARTISTS

ATUL BHALLA is an installation artist and photographer based in Delhi. His body of work is concerned with issues of the city and relentless urbanization. He applies photography as an extension of the conceptual framework for most of his work. Atul Bhalla deals not only with the body, but its performativity, relating to cultural practices, where there is an oblique equation of violence with the male body. He rarely represents the male body in its entirety, rather presenting it in fragments in the act of performance. His own body is represented in a performative mode, and photography is applied as a series of documents around the process of performance.

BV SURESH is a painter based in Baroda and is currently a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.U Baroda. His video work, ‘Retakes of the Shadows’ reflects on the constant threat of violence inherent in institutions of patriarchy. His critique of maleness and masculinity includes the institution of art and its practice.

KRITI ARORA, a Delhi based artist works with dislocation, migration and fractured lives. Masculinity is a subtle undercurrent in her imagery. There is an interplay of absence and presence in her portrayal of the body. Her series on migrant labour from Bihar and on policewomen in Delhi relocates masculinity outside of class and gender. Much of her photography exhibited here is located in Kashmir. The patriarchal/masculine references in her work are often represented from the point of view of a woman.

RAMESHWAR BROOTA has constantly worked with the male body, whether as painter, photographer or film maker. During the first half of the 20th century, men were often associated with images of industrialization. Broota’s work centres on a late 20th century shift, where man is no longer another cog in the industrial machine, but a being – distinct, fragile and vulnerable. His emphasis on detail, whether wrinkles, body hair or skin texture, accounts for the tactile quality of the representation of the male body. Through the act of representation, treatment of the male body, he questions notions of gaze and the objectification of the body.

SHEBA CHHACHHI is an installation artist, photographer, activist, and writer based in New Delhi. Her art practice overlaps with her political and activist engagements. Warrior/Saint: is ‘a reflection on masculinity, juxtaposing the Buddha with images of macho heroes from hindi movie fan material.’
In this work, violence as commonplace, normative and masculine is reiterated through the stereotype – ‘the man with the gun’.

SUNIL GUPTA as an artist/photographer traverses many identities and places. His concerns as an artist revolve around homosexuality and exile. Using personal history as an archive, Sunil Gupta constructs photographs as a record of exile, relationships, sexual/political difference; he contextualizes the personal in the social or the public in the private. His entire body of work is a powerful contestation of a hegemonic, normative masculinity, representing it instead, as fragile and bordering on the other.