In the grey zone: 12 artists present their in-between interpretations of gender

In Beech Sadak, Kolkata-based artist Sumantra Mukherjee looks at the overlapping and cohabiting of ideas and techniques in the folk and the contemporary.

Delhi-based artist Nilanjana Nandy wonders what is like being Alice and traces a state of becoming – how a person is always an interface of myriad things, which need not be monumental, and can instead be as mundane and miniscule as reading the newspaper or making notes. The corner is surrounded by life size nudes, stack of newspapers, a pile of artist books, a colouring book scattered on the floor and another pile on the book shelves. Beside this, Kolkata-based professor Epsita Halder presents the stories of women and their lament over Imam Husain’s martyrdom in the Shia quarters of West Bengal.

In her collection of photographs and voice recordings, titled Karbala, Halder becomes their repository of stories and tries to retell the pain that she has gathered in the past seven years. They both are among the 12 artists who explore the idea of in between-ness and revisit the myriad premises around gender, at the exhibition titled In Between, presented by the Aboutturn Project, “After the first exhibition, the research, enquiry and the practice, made us think about the intermediary, about ideas falling in-between – it was neither this or that. Gender has the idea of in between-ness – the way we compartmentalise gender as man, woman and transgender is not the only way. So the artists used folk practices, traditional materials, or an anthropological approach to enquire the same,” says Nandy, who initiated the project last year. It is an attempt to look at individual voices and expressions in their state of becoming; how they serve as building blocks to a larger whole, she says.

Along with them, Delhi-based textile artist and weaver, Priya Ravish Mehra, in her work in Rafoo-Mend Thyself, looks at the simple technique of rafoo and uses it as a metaphor for healing in the present scenario of ideological polarization and communal violence, while in Beech Sadak, Kolkata-based artist Sumantra Mukherjee looked at the overlapping and cohabiting of ideas and techniques in the folk and the contemporary through his collaboration with the communities at the villages of Ajodhya, Bonkati and Joydev, Kenduli, all in West Bengal. Talking about the About Turn Project, Nandy says, “We, as artists, always want to meet each other, visit the studios and see the practices. So a group of us came together last year to collaborate and it has become an active community, and open ended group in terms of age and geographical location. It all started with one question – Is the female point of view essentially feminine? and all the pieces came up organically as we focus on the process of enquiry and not the end product.”

Performance artist duo Aastha Gandhi and Ankush will present We Women//: Trigger Warning, as a part of the exhibition, on September 23, 6 pm, at the Korean Cultural India, Lajpat Nagar. It ends on September 25.