“Moving Still: Performative Photography in India” is curated by Diana Freundl, Associate Curator of Asian Art and Gayatri Sinha, independent curator and Founder of Critical Collective. The exhibition features thirteen Indian artists and more than 100 works dating from the 1800s to the present day. Their photographic practices focus on constructing and reconstructing realities through performative means, by exploring themes of gender, religion and sexual identity. The exhibition includes works that range from the representation to the reshaping of the everyday, exemplifying the potentiality of the photographic medium in building new narratives through performance.
Photography has been popular in India since the mid-19th century, not long after its invention in France. At the time, photographers based in Mumbai, Kolkata and Madras organised lectures and exhibitions, and published journals that fostered an active culture of experimentation and exchange. The legacy of those early pioneers of photography lives on today in the work of contemporary artists.
“Moving Still” examines some key works from the early period of Indian photography, such as prints from Sawai Ram Singh II (1835–1880), the Maharaja of Jaipur from 1835 to 1880, known as India’s first “Photographer Prince”. The Maharaja was not only one of the first Indian photographers to make use of the medium in new artistic ways, but he was also one of the first that challenged the image of traditional masculinity in favour of a gentler, more sophisticated identity that through symbolism and theatricality represented an alternative masculinity. The “Photographer Prince” often performed in his photographs as the subject, sometimes dressed in regal garb with his dog Tatty.
In other images, he transformed himself into a Shiva devotee, communicating his dramatic break from Vaishnavism, the faith of his forefathers, in favour of Shaivism. This event created a controversy across the state, which the Maharaja fought by using the agency of photography. He made postcards with his image as a Shiva devotee during puja, or worship, and circulated them through his kingdom. As Gayatri Sinha writes in her catalogue essay,
Through this single gesture he bent into purposive use the agency of the photograph, the performative gesture of enacting the puja as “evidence” and the use of the popular instrument of circulation, the postcard. He thus demonstrated his recognition that identity could be assumed, performed, and then frozen in a photographic gestalt.
His photographic studio also became a space for social equalisation, as Sinha writes:
Rajput nobility in their regalia, women of the harem, performers of the Ram Prakash theatre, and British residents and their families are seen against painted backdrops, performing against a British landscape setting—each plucked out of their everyday contexts into a setting of Ram Singh’s imagining.
Slightly later, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil (1870–1954) further refined the theatricality of Ram Singh’s images, photographing himself and his family. He captured images of his Hungarian wife, Marie Antoinette, and of his young daughters – the artist Amrita Sher-Gil and Indira (who was artist Vivan Sundaram’s mother) and their life in Hungary, Paris, Shimla, and at the family estate at Saraya, Gorakhpur. Vivan Sundaram (b. 1943) revived his grandfather’s archive through a digital montage of images drawn from Amrita Sher-Gil’s paintings and Umrao Singh’s photographs, shuffling the family album and creating a fictive archive within the original, as Sinha explains. She goes on:
Umrao Singh creates a highly self-reflexive, even narcissistic self-image as yogi, scholar, amateur astronomer, and gentleman of leisure. Through cumulative and diversionary layers, the family predilection for dressing up and enacting a theatrical cosmopolitanism, of continually appearing—posed, coiffed, and highly self-conscious—is constructed. In the series Re-take of Amrita (2001), Sundaram embellishes some of these inversions as the young girls play grown women, scrambling location, time, and context to create a taut family narrative.
Vivan Sundaram suggested his grandfather was one of the early “invisible pioneers of modern Indian photography”, as Sinha writes. His images proposed yet another alternative vision of masculinity, that of the scholarly recluse, as a member of the elite Sikh gentry of the Punjab.
In more recent practices, the masculine figure is futher challanged in Nikhil Chopra’s (b. 1974) images, performative self-portraits that re-interpret the turn-of-the-century royal portraiture, while also commenting on and working as memory landscapes of socio-political changes. Naveen Kishore, Sunil Gupta and Tejal Shah go a step further “to enact the “subversion” of conservative notions of gender through a staged visual narrative”, as curator Diana Freundl writes in her essay, explaining that
Through their performative imagery, Kishore, Gupta, and Shah destabilize heterosexual normativity by enacting alternative gender identities. We see empowerment of the cross-dressed subject in Kishore’s Performing the Goddess—The Chapal Bhaduri Story (1999), the open expression of homosexual love in Gupta’s Sun City (2011), and the expansion of a wide scope of queer identities in Shah’s Between the Waves (2012).
In Performing the Goddess: Chapal Bhaduri’s Story, Naveen Kishore (b. 1953) revisits the life of iconic Indian theatre actor Chapal Bhaduri. Badhuri’s job was to perform gender: in his stage appearances, he transformed from man to goddess, becoming the leading lady of Bengal’s traditional folk theatre. Bhaduri spent his life playing women in the village theatre, and now enacts the “detested goddess of disease” Sitala Mata, who as Freundl explains, cures souls from both spiritual hauntings and more quotidian ailments such as poxes and pustules. Kishore’s work explores the meaning of becoming a woman every night for Badhuri, through photographic images and a video documentary. In an interview with Kishore, the actor revelead:
I perform as a woman, but I am a man. Maybe I could have been a woman, but I chose not to. There can be many ways of transformation, and this is the way I choose. In my acting, I would often keep my femininity aside to perform, that is where I won, in surrendering my effeminacy to act. Womanhood and femininity are different. That is the truth of my life.
While Kishore delves into third person’s experiences of gender transformation on stage, Sunil Gupta (b. 1953) examines gender identity from a personal perspective. Gupta has since the 1970s explored the politics and experience of homosexuality through his own identity as an HIV-positive Indian man living and working between Canada, the United States, England and India. In the last thirty years, he has been focusing on India’s gay communities, where homosexuality, until September 2018, was a criminal act punishable with ten years of imprisonment.
Meanwhile, Tejal Shah engages with “gender fluidity” in her work Between the Waves. Shah is a lens-based artist and an advocate for queer ecology, which reimagines environmental politics in light of queer theory. Freundl explains that Shah
creates complex narratives, relying heavily on costumes and props in her films, which reference poetry, art history, world religions, and environmentalism. In this multi-channel video installation, images of hybrid beings—human, plant, and animal—are brought together in shifting relations of intimacy.
Shah depicts her “humanimals” migrating through vividly coloured dystopic landscapes, posing and engaged in sexual acts. Freundl explains about her work:
For Shah, ecology, sexuality, and gender are deeply interconnected, and by subverting and melding the physical appearance and actions of humans, plants, and animals, she not only challenges commonly held biological assumptions about gender but also expands the scope of possibilities for relating to one’s subjectivities and to the earth, thus producing shifting and hybrid identities.
The performative element of photography is also used by other artists in the exhibition, such as Pushpamala N, Sonia Khurana, Vivan Sundaram and Ranbir Kaleka. Each artist in their own way plays with spatial and temporal dimensions, with personal and collective memory, and nostalgia. Pushpamala N’s enacted photographs are of particular interest in their creation of images of empowered women. Inspired by cinema and its female characters, the artist created Phantom Lady (1996–98), her first photo performance and character incarnation, which reflects the essence of film noir through a thriller-like plot where photography is treated as both a documentary and a performative process. Roobina Karode goes on to explain in her essay how Pushpamala N “engages different classes of people into playing different characters”. Karode continues:
As one looks into the dramaturgic aspect of this and any of her subsequent staged photographs, one discovers that she consciously and persistently refers to a lineage of performative space that has a long history in India, one mostly based in urban popular culture rather than in folk traditions. Icons like the fearless Nadia from 1930s Hindi cinema, who performed stunts onscreen, becomes an alter-self in Pushpamala’s performance in Phantom Lady. Conjured props and supporting characters that contained the narrative turn up as a hyper-imagined still from a film that was never shot or even attempted to be made.
The 1998 series Sunhere Sapne also contains an element of filmic staging, borrowing the popular cinematic trope of depicting both the bright and dark side of a character, as Karode explains, writing:
The middle-class housewife dressed in a housecoat and her alter ego, a mysterious woman in a golden dress and bouffant hairstyle, are posited as binaries inside the domestic space and outside on the boulevard or street, with the main character ultimately stuck at the threshold and pointing a gun directly at the viewer.
Pushpamala N tinted and painted the black-and-white photographs with bright colours, to give them a kitsch, vintage appearance that suggests a nostalgia for film entertainment, a nostalgia that is often found in old middle-class family albums and studio photographs.
“Moving Still” gives a new perspective on photographic practices in India today, through the images of some early pioneers of the medium as well as more recent, provocative ones, by focusing on the performative element. Quoted by VAN, Kathleen S. Bartels, Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery says:
Moving Still shifts the focus from India’s preeminent and historical traditions of sculpture and painting, to its rich and diverse history of photography. While this exhibition examines contemporary practices, it tells a fascinating narrative of the artistic impact and influences across three generations of artists who turn the camera onto themselves in ground-breaking ways.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
“Moving Still: Performative Photography in India” runs from 19 April to 2 September 2019 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada.