Sita Devi of Baroda
02/03/2010 · Mansi Shah
The Other Song
01/04/2010 · Mansi Shah
In 1935, the Indian singer Rasoolan Bai sang, “My breasts are wounded, don’t throw flowers at me”. Never to be sung again, the song eventually got lost. Seventy-four years later, director Saba Dewan travels through Varanasi in southern India, in search of that forgotten song and the story of the women who inspired it. She encounters the modern-day descendants of the courtesans who, until a century ago, were amongst the most educated of Indian women. Today they’re considered deviants. Yet, their stories are irrevocably linked to the making of modern India, and the transitions around the censorship of female sexualities and cultural expression. – DIFF
Interview with Saba Dewan at Dubai International Film Festival 2009
Still from The Other Song (2009)
Rasoolan Bai – Phool Gendawa Na Maaro, Lagat Karejwa Mein Chot
Chitra Ganesh
01/03/2010 · Alexander Keefe
Chitra Ganesh’s Lady Mollusk (2009) sits stonily, with the aura of a prophetess demonstrating an old and meaningful wound that is unlikely to cicatrice itself closed any time soon. To the contrary, it looks cosmically alight, spilling ectoplasmic fairy-dust like a mystical inkjet womb. Bubblegum shoelaces stream from her eyes sideways at a distant, dispersed set of heavens, and although this is one war that never seems won, what’s under attack here are clearly the poofy-sleeved perspectivalisms and vanishing points of the Western hegemon’s scopic regimes: instead of concentrating our gaze on the lady herself, these florescent laser beams shoot off at invisible horizons, pulling us wonderfully toward inscrutable objects that float, weightless, beyond the edges of the image. Newton be damned: chrome plastic bubbles form and dissolve in the air around her according to some hidden and unfamiliar physics, blinded and dully reflective. If I look closely I can see myself standing there tiny, entrapped and multiplied by fourteen, with no head, upside down.
Lady Mollusk (2009)
There is a deep mock-Orientalist archival riff at work behind this piece, a bass note sample one hears looping away a lot in “Indian” (post-Saatchi, I can only use that in quotes because I don’t know what it means) art these days… often overplayed frankly. Here, happily, it actually advances the cause, giving its otherwise pixellated, digitally flattened, deliberately low-fi painted lady a set of ghostly black shadows, tiny points of unknowable nullity impervious to any kind of analog light. For more empirical thrills, we have to reckon with the coarse, black, sloppy, tangled braids turned loose from beneath her shawl—refugee tresses quickly tied and spilling forth onto the floor, coming at the viewer with an uncertain, possibly dangerous set of motives.
She’s obviously some kind of shamaness, a sorceress busy at a spell. The monstrous, many-eyed, tongue-pink nudibranch that she cradles like a Spanish guitar, backlit with a chemical phosphorescence and draped gently over her shoulder like a friend pulled from a house fire? That must be her familiar.
Thanks to Nitin Mukul for the photo!
Sonia Khurana
11/17/2009 · Mansi Shah
Still from Bird, 1999
Shreya Ghoshal II
04/09/2009 · Grant Davis
Hai Isi Mein Pyar Ki Aabroo
Khoyi Khoyi Yaadein
Main Giridhar Ke Rang Raati
Lakshmi Menon
04/06/2009 · Mansi Shah
Givenchy, AW 08 / Resort 09
Hermès, SS 08
Anita Dube
03/25/2009 · Mansi Shah
Inside Out, 2007
Dystopia’s Spillage, 2006
Silver Gelatin Prints
Madhubani Paintings From Bihar
02/25/2009 · Mansi Shah
Paintings colored by henna leaves, bougainvillea and
neem made by the women of Madhubani.
