Curator Statement

Guest Curator: Kathryn Myers, Professor of Art, The University of Connecticut

The artists in this exhibition share points of origin and connection in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora - including India, Pakistan, Trinidad and the United States - all presently work in the New York metropolitan area. A city with a significant South Asian population, Edison is an appropriate site for this exhibition: a presentation representing a wealth of creative endeavors that reflect the rich diversity of this community, an exhibition where a multiplicity of artistic languages and media invite translation, interpretation and engagement.

For Satyakam Saha, Sonia Chaudhary, and Asha Ganpat, South Asian religion, faith and philosophy offer points of connection, investigation and critique.

Sonia Chaudhary's sumptuous hand-crafted book "I Am Sin" evokes the powerful presence of holy texts such as the Quran, Bible or Torah. However rather than divine revelation and religious instruction, Chaudhary's volume reveals searing words from five Muslim women originally from Pakistan but now living in the United States. Their accounts cite instances of abuse that may be tragically common among women from any community or religious group throughout the world, but that take on special significance for Chaudhary, who as a Muslim woman, interrogates religious traditions, expectations, restrictions, and social taboos both as personal exploration and to bring the transgressions upon the bodies and souls of these woman to light. The exquisite beauty of this book belies the pain enfolded in its pages, and is a tribute to the women who entrusted Chaudhary with their stories. In a very different and more open-ended form, fragile sculptures made of porcelain, beeswax, and thread examine cultural expectations of womanly behavior such as the ambiguous meanings and messages of bodily ornamentation.

Among the approximately 330,000 Hindu deities, Kali is perhaps the most widely known outside her home country of India. Her paradoxical nature as the most terrifying manifestation of the great goddess as well as divine mother, has been the subject of scholarly and popular attention both in India and the west. In her viewer-interactive tableau, Asha Ganpat presents one of the most popular depictions of Kali astride or dancing on the recumbent form of the god Shiva, symbolizing in one of many interpretations, transcendent power made immanent through interaction with the goddess, the all-powerful shakti of Shiva. Many icons and myths throughout the world have become diluted or emptied of meaning both within and outside of their countries of origin. In her work, Ganpat explores icons such as Kali, that for her, despite or perhaps because of their ancient roots, still hold power and meaning in contemporary society. Here she sets up a situation "that allows the viewer to expose their own bias and beliefs". In an American theme-park like setting, Ganpat invites the viewer to step into her tableau and "become Kali", where this powerful and foreboding deity with her own immense and complex mythology becomes an accessible "photo opportunity". Through our participation we are invited to consider our individual and collective ideas of tradition and also translation. Are there some things not able to withstand intact, the journey across time geography and language?

In Satyakam Saha's luminous abstractions, shape, color, and most vividly, the power of light engage core concepts of desire, creation, and the merging of active and passive forces found in the varied traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity. The Yab-Yum figures of wisdom and compassion in Tibetan art, and the iconic form of Shiva-Shakti in Hinduism exemplify the energy of creation incarnate. By contrast Saha's radically non-objective shapes reference the aniconic elegance of Tantric diagrams, yantras and mandalas, as well as astrological and cosmological diagrams. Through minimal means and with profound elegance, Saha configures symbols of the cosmic force of creation that leads ultimately to destruction. In this continuing cycle his focus is the point of charged contact, a state of ecstatic rapture where our sense of separateness or individual ego is absorbed into ultimate reality.

Like Asha Ganpat, Nidhi Jalan and Indrani Nayar-Gall address issues of shifting tradition, identity and power through the process of migration. Both artists, along with Sonia Chaudhary and Ruby Chishti particularly focus on the experiences of women.

India's colonial past and immanent presence provide fresh inspiration for a continuing dialogue regarding shifting power relations and identity in Nidhi Jalan's video "Bangalored". Intricately stratified personal associations between colony and colonizer are typified, as in so many popular novels, by the role of the white memsahib, the ladies tea-party, and the country club where only very select, if any, Indians were ever admitted. In this video, the title of the city synonymous with a new and radically altered if still stereotyped notion of India, becomes an active verb describing the contemporary process and results of "outsourcing" in relation to the past. Here, rather than technological skills or mundane record-keeping, the role of wifely duties is outsourced. Drinking tea in their hats of decaying fruit, the two women trade identities as the American woman not only instructs in "proper" use of language, but in more intimate matters as well. The American woman's role as wife has been "outsourced" to the Indian woman, providing an ironic and inventive twist on more conventional expectations regarding not only the economic and political effects of outsourcing, but the personal as well.

Indrani Nayar-Gall has spent significant parts of her life in India and Barbados, she now lives in the United States. Through prints and multi-media works on paper, she explores issues of migration from an intensely personal standpoint. Many of her images are layered with cryptic maps, fingerprints, words and figures. Some suggest diagrams of journeys she has taken, places she has lived or remembered, or perhaps unspoken and ill-defined boundaries she has struggled to transgress. Some works parallel the encounters of Alice in Wonderland who serves as an apt metaphor for one who may endures acute disorientation and displacement. Through the layers of her work, Nayar-Gall exhumes the unsettling sense of being perceived as "the other", in its many obvious as well as subtle manifestations. Such intimate knowledge based on her own experiences serves as a useful departure point for Nayar-Gall as she investigates a range of "panoramas of displacement and loss" found throughout the world. Despite the more fluid nature of identities and boundaries in our present century, those who consider themselves "nation" continue to stand-off against those on the "margin" as the balance of power and privilege continues to shift into ever-new emerging forms.

Ruby Chishti presents the torsos of women made from worn stockings of various colors and transparencies. These figures, which appear to be of various races, weights and ages, dance or float across the wall enveloped, bound and linked by a swirling mass of hair. As well as moving horizontally, "in a restless but beautiful movement", some of the bodies appear to ascend vertically, perhaps representing disembodied presences of people Chishti once knew. Although she displays only torsos - a synecdoche that could easily erase identity, these figures with their very distinct and lovingly tended attitudes and very human imperfections, appear to be intimately known. Their nudity seems not a sign of awkwardness or exposure, but of comfort and familiarity. Much of Chishti's work is grounded in her deeply personal experiences and memories, some of family cared for and lost to her as well as those who remain. There are also memories of volatile political tensions in her native Pakistan, a country from which she only recently departed. "Armour", the title pivoting on the theme of love and also defense, is potently political as well as personal, the haunted figure of a baby that will not be born, in a defiance of expectations brought to bear on the lives of many women. Here Chishti's use of a non-traditional sculptural material, unused sanitary napkins, so beautiful in this riveting context, serves as a metaphor for individual affirmation and choice.

A cartoonist for Indian newspapers in his native Bangalore, Raghava KK has "reconfigured" himself as a New York based multi-media artist. His distinctive bodies of work, paintings, drawings and watercolors, are organized into curious categories such as "Inherent Scraps of Gluttony", "Square Faced and Cotton Eyed", "Issues of Chronic Abstraction", or "Fragile Circus". For this exhibition KK has created a unique work directly on the curved wall of the gallery that falls into perhaps the most understated of his otherwise provocative labels, as "Protest Art". Making reference to cartoons as well as street graphics, a vibrant form of popular art seen all over India but particularly in the south where KK grew up, the images sprawl over large surfaces, giving the illusion of absorbing and transforming prior messages including mundane notices, political signs and symbols, advertisements and graffiti. His compelling patina of marks and messages, incorporate a dizzying range of sources and imagery, from the history of art, popular culture, political figures, cartoons, and hybrid human/animals. The sense of polarized rage and humor in his work recalls the much earlier work of F.N. Souza, a renowned South Indian artist who also emigrated to New York, from his native Goa. Like those of Souza, who protested the corruption of church and state of his times, the topics KK engages are both timeless and locally immediate. Words sprawled across some images mock "moral police" or "freedom of expression" as well as offering "free art," while angels and doves attempt to elude the grasp of gluttonous holders of power. KK's work bridges definitions of specific and universal, local and international, high and low, he reinvigorates art's ability to speak many different languages at once, and for everyone.