Playing with Pleasure: Gender Bender festival showcases Arunima Bose's interactive vulva 'sculptures'

Some time ago, artist and social worker Arunima Bose found herself just sketching vaginas. "The vaginas became images of things that affected me – a stormy sky vagina, a red-flower vagina on a spring day, etc," says Bose.

The idea to make a three-dimensional representations of these drawings of the female genitals was but a logical extension. The result of that idea – seven 'sculptures' of the vulva made with sanitary pads and tampons, scraps of cloth, plastic rope, dried flowers, etc – was shown at the two-day Gender Bender festival held in Bengaluru last weekend.

The festival, jointly curated and hosted by arts collective Sandbox Collective and the Goethe – Institute and co-curated by The Ladies Finger, showcased a number of art works in progress themed around 'gender'. Bose's project, named 'In Full Bloom: Playing with Pleasure,' was among 10 others which included paintings by Ibtisam, an African-American artist, presenting the lives of women and members of the LGBTQ community in west Asia; Sukriti Sureka's installation of a hutment painted by women Madhubani painters; a lyrical essay on the mother-daughter dynamic; and an installation made of bras by an artist who has had double mastectomy.

The idea for Bose's vulva sculptures originated, as much of recent feminist/gender discourse, with the December 2012 gangrape and murder of Jyoti Singh. But Bose, who teaches art to immigrant Afghan girls living in Delhi, says, "I found myself thinking of it constantly. But while it is important to talk about the rape and oppression of women, I didn't want to focus only on the negatives. It is as important to talk about the positives, in order to instil confidence in women. Pleasure through touch is one aspect of it."

To that end, "interactivity" is an important aspect of "In Full Bloom..." – viewers of the wall-mounted sculptures were invited to feel the textures, to trace their fingers along the folds and clefts. "Women are taught right from childhood not to look at their vaginas, or to touch it – shame shame pappi shame. As adolescents, some of them give in. What are the different ways you can please yourself? Why is it that heterosexuality is at the top of this hierarchy – is peno-vaginal sex the only kind of sex? These were few ideas I worked with," says Bose.

At first, viewers – part of Bangalore's swish set, the culturati and the art brigade – didn't get the point. There were quizzical looks, hints of hesitation and awkward glances to see if someone else was doing it, until finally Bose had to egg a few to give it a go. "Come, let's try it…," said one young woman to her partner, taking her by the arm closer to a vagina sculpted out of sanitary napkins, tampons and their plastic packaging. Feeling the contours, and the strategically placed tampons, they giggled before running their hands through the hairy tassels of the next vagina. And just like that, they all touched – girls and matriarchs, women and the men accompanying them, trans and homosexuals. In the end there was no shame.

(With inputs from Marisha Karwa)