War crimes on exiled Rohingyas and Syrian refugees, racism-laced Brexit and post-Partition woes back home converge on Rewati Shahani's ink and gouache 'moons' on film and paper. The Mumbai-bred London-based artist showcased the works at her first India solo show, titled 'Tides', on April 8 and 9 at Colaba's Clark House Initiative. These continue to remain accessible for viewing with their price points– all under a lakh – mentioned on the curator's Instagram handle: @cultivateart.co. Cultivate Art is an initiative to tap young talent and bring affordable art to the masses via pop-up exhibitions, under the curatorship of art consultant Farah Siddiqui and Amy Stafford, who worked with the renowned English artist Damien Hirst for six years.
War crimes on exiled Rohingyas and Syrian refugees, racism-laced Brexit and post-Partition woes back home converge on Rewati Shahani's ink and gouache 'moons' on film and paper. The Mumbai-bred London-based artist showcased the works at her first India solo show, titled 'Tides', on April 8 and 9 at Colaba's Clark House Initiative. These continue to remain accessible for viewing with their price points– all under a lakh – mentioned on the curator's Instagram handle: @cultivateart.co. Cultivate Art is an initiative to tap young talent and bring affordable art to the masses via pop-up exhibitions, under the curatorship of art consultant Farah Siddiqui and Amy Stafford, who worked with the renowned English artist Damien Hirst for six years.
While an increasing number of contemporary artists have broached the loss of home, family, identity, individuality and humanity due to border conflict that injures nationhood, Shahani has internalised these themes on an extremely personal level; 'Tides' being a culmination of this subjective view. The 33-year-old Sindhi hails from a family that fled Pakistan during Partition, and she and her sister Uttara have grew up listening to post-Partition tales from their father, the noted film director and screenwriter, Kumar Shahani. "Sindhis found it difficult to pick a side as there were both Hindus and Muslims among the community," says Shahani. This inability to decide, she says, saw many displaced Sindhis, and even Punjabis relocate to a third nation altogether, prompting the maximum number of diaspora from these communities.
Today, Uttara is doing her PhD in Post Partition studies while Rewati looks to the arts to find meaning, using her 'moons' to tell the story. For instance, a pair of black-and-white orbs that strongly bring to mind SH Raza's bindus, resemble pies. Red markings divide the circle like flesh slashed under the blade of a knife. Exactly how the two nations were dissected and left to bled. Other 'moons', blotted with a fluidity that is similar to the Indian tie-and-dye technique of bandhini, reflect constant migration and change of identity to refugee status, all within man-made borders. Shahani takes inspiration from the ebb and flow of oceanic tides controlled by the lunar body to illustrate this. She ensures that her ink and gouache applications form their own patterns, but also remain within the radius. "I control how much the paper must bleed and the film absorb colour," says Shahani, who has exhibited in Stockholm and Paris, and repeatedly at tumbledown factories with her European artist-friends, in the middle of winter, despite "catching the worst of chest infections".
The dialogue on shared geographies began with her previous exhibition titled 'Maps' that had large, imagined blueprints of London's boroughs and Mumbai's ever evolving archipelago in ink on kora cotton. For her, both cities feel like home — Mumbai, where she has lived all her life, and London where she moved at 21 to pursue Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. Now settled in London with her husband and daughter, Shahani's own moving around is an instance of how migration is even governed by economics, not only war. But when outside London and its familiar Asian diaspora, the hostile environment post Brexit, she admits, constantly makes her remember the immigrant status. "I find the word 'immigrant' stigmatising. With Trump wanting to build walls, it comes back to the archaic, colonial idea of divide and rule."
Her artworks thus reflect her life, positioned between these shared geographies, India and Pakistan, and Mumbai and London. "These [works] are an effect of the stories then [during Partition] and the effect of what’s going on globally now. I make sure I'm aware of what is going on, and provide my reaction to it through my art."
Shahani is one of the few artists who has done the reverse; progressed from video art to paper. She initially made a film on an African-British man, who after having moved from South Africa to England had to deal with a new language. The film gauged his reaction to this psychological upheaval with him talking from different sides of his mouth. “I still remain connected to film,” she chuckles, referring to the moons printed on analogue film.
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