The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Nilima Sheikh has gained from Persian and Rajput miniatures an indulgence in beauty which her modernist sensibility turns into pure colour and through quick transfiguration into female aura. There is a glimpse here of suppressed narcissism as painterly effulgence in the light of which the artist tests her representations. Placed in a larger arena of a feminine masquerade, Nilima's depictions of desire as suicidal abandon as apotheosis recall the passion of Meera, the sixteenth-century saint-poet, whose songs still echo in the voices of contemporary women performers. Your Highness, Now you can't close me with walls. The wise are now dear to me, lost is womanly shame, I've left my mother's house and the taste of dance is on my tongue. Take the wedding necklace, you can break the golden bracelet I don't want a fort or a palace and my hair is loose says Meera.1 Songspace 1995 Installation at 'Africus', First Johannesburg Biennale In Indian classical canons, as in medieval sufi/bhakti (mystic/devotional) texts, there is a relay of images of the restless beloved, of a saint's passion, of wandering nuns, of libertarian worship. In NiIima's iconography seekers multiply in continuous narration, they change scale walking through deserts, swimming across rivers, living, drowning. There is temporal transcendence and spatial doubling. A matron gives birth in ritual space; domestic tedium of stitching, sweeping yields a daydream. The pleasures of performance find mimetic extension in an open theatre with forest animals. Nilima is especially adept at devising metaphors and morphologies for the five senses five elements five seasons-summer, monsoon, autumn, winter, spring. If you add to that the monthly calendar of the moon and menstruation and the baramasa (twelve-monthly cycle) of erotic bewilderment, one can see that this is a way of being that comes from the specific resource of Indian aesthetics, from a poetics almost entirely based on the experience of love in separation. Thereon Nilima links herself to Asian mystical traditions that sweep through poetry, ballads, narratives and their illumination in manuscript folios. In successive acts of apprenticeship 100 I A RT I s T s: sou T H AN o sou T H- EA s T A s I A she seeks to gauge the spill of vertical space in Chinese scrolls, the fanning out of narratives in Japanese screens. She trains herself, step by step, to become a synthesiser of oriental painterly traditions. As a common formal feature she elicits an epiphanous vision where motifs appear and disappear in the field and at the edge of the picture, touching the hashia, hem, border, and going into oblivion. She cues into painterly traditions where images seem always to be on the brink: pretending to be intimate they skirt an immensity; bonded by love they figure as renunciates. The tent she is making, with its architectural proportions, iron grid, wooden plinth, rises to the grandiosity of a pavilion. It has cloth walls hung like resplendent banners-like pichhvais 2 -on a hexagonal structure with the seventh face open for entry/exit. The paintings serve as backdrops for a female performer, the artist herself or her repertory of peripatetic players enacting solitude. Here is a paradox: Nilima's cloth pavilion, her shamiana, proposes a state of majesty for a liminal soul! We may ask whether a woman can inherit a soul from her lineage. She can well inherit a home, its flapping wings rolled into a hold-all unfolding in the storm-as six banners, twelve paintings with vertically ranged perspectival views ending up in a high, free-floating sky. This is an ornamental fantasy of some magnitude. But the broad horizontal brushwork soaking, saturating the primed cloth with a dry translucency of hues (earth/mineral powders: terre-verte, ochre, burnt-sienna, mercury– vermilion applied with curdled milk-glue, a richly pigmented casein tempera) makes the space continuous with the landscape where the tent is pitched. The tent is a camouflaged abode hoisted for a season, it could be something of a mirage. Painted on all sides, its polyvocal imagery breathes life and easily reverses the inside-outside protocol of public and private space. Nilima Sheikh opens her generous mantle of legends about nomadic women and introduces a pictorial geography in which female corporeal identity finds phenomenological elaboration. 3 She offers thereby what could be a feminist trope for spatiality itself. Geeta Kapur, Art Writer, New Delhi, India 1 In the Dark of the Heart: Songs ofMeera. trans. S.Futehally, lnduslHarper Collins, New Delhi. 1995, p.47 The Nathadwara pichhvai is apainted cloth-hanging that serves as abackdrop for the icon of Shrinathji.Thousands of painters. masterful and kitsch,keep alive in consequence of the daily ritual of the god's glimpse-the jhanki. From this pilgrim town in Rajasthan,Nilima gets arange of earth pigments:she also gets her minutely thin, squirrel-hair brushes that curve at the end to facilitate painting small and wide arabesques. Luce lrigaray's terminology in her discussion 'On the Maternal Order' and in 'Writing as aWoman' is freely adapted to interpret Nilima Sheikh's project See Luce lrigaray, Je, tu, nous: Towards aCulture ofDifference, Routledge, London, 1993,pp.37-39, p.59