The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

95 ARTISTS Armour Suit for Rani of Jhansi II 2017 Galvanised steel, feathers, leather, ed. 2/2 / 88 x 40 x 32cm / Private collection, Sydney / Image courtesy: The artist and Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong | London Born 1968, Bahawalpur, Pakistan Lives and works in London, United Kingdom, and Karachi, Pakistan Indian poet Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s poem Rani of Jhansi (Jhansi ki rani) recounts the valour of Queen Jhansi, a celebrated heroine of the resistance against the British Raj, as she discards her bangles to take up arms to fight during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The poem conveys how the British sent the Queen’s clothes to markets to humiliate her; however, she is portrayed as a gallant fighter adorned in jewels, and equipped with weapons and armour. It is one of the many feminine narratives that Naiza Khan explores in her sculptures, where the body is contextualised in a tension between beauty, power and violence. With a diverse artistic and discursive practice, Khan has been committed over several decades to investigating ‘the ambiguous and complex relationship between the female body and female identity’. 1 Living in London and Karachi, she explores the representation of women in postcolonial Pakistan, and, more broadly, exposes fissures in public and private conventions of beauty and gender. During the period 1997–2002, Khan deliberately moved her work out of the gallery space with the ‘Henna hands’ series, works that embedded the feminine body into culturally and socially conservative public spaces. Using hand-shaped stencils and henna, she stencilled figures and fragments of women’s bodies on public walls in a working-class neighbourhood of Karachi. Spending hours walking the streets, she observed the temporality of the works in the process, and their vulnerability as they were often deliberately removed, sometimes with parts of the anatomy scraped out. Simultaneously, they brought the traditionally private women’s ritual of henna into a politicised public context alongside advertisements, billboards and public notices. 2 The series was Khan’s first encounter with the political role of the body, and helped her realise its mutability and potential as a subject of resistance. 3 Since 2006, Khan has created a vast body of sculptural work underpinned by an intense drawing practice that further ruminates on the private and public presence of the female body. The works in the ‘Heavenly Ornaments’ series are based on garments and armour, and developed from her readings of Bahishti Zewar (Heavenly Ornaments) , a socio-religious Urdu text largely focused on the moral education of women and girls. The works borrow from disparate cultural and historical forms, as well as symbols of beauty and desire, and refer to heroines and female warriors, costumes and bodily apparatus. Incorporating holes, spikes and bullet piercings, certain works also signal the militarism and violence that the body has been subject to throughout the world. Khan crafts her sculptures in galvanised steel with leather, latex, feathers and fabric attachments, and describes them as ‘living object[s], part skin, part shield’, conjuring unsettling associations between sensual, jewel-like surfaces and prohibitive bodily confinements. 4 Like an unworn garment, only a suggestion of the body is apparent; however, the works articulate physical features that have been idealised or coveted over time. Some configurations evoke ideas of beauty and elegance, while others — such as corsets and chastity belts — imply dominance and objectification. In both material and texture, they convey contrast and innuendo: rigid galvanised steel wraps the body and gives a sense of movement akin to fabric, and the suppleness of fabric is used to form rigid definitions of the contours of the body, while surfaces are both ornamental in their lustre and impermeable in their strength. Naiza Khan explores the connotations, ambiguities and paradoxes of how the female body has been treated throughout history, creating an interplay between empowerment and dominance, beauty and desire, and by uncovering contexts where the female body has been hidden and where it has been revered. Tarun Nagesh Endnotes 1 Naiza Khan, ‘Henna hands’ [artist statement], Naiza Khan , 2006, <http:// www.naizakhan.com/data/uploads/galleries/henna-hands-site-specific- project-cantonment-railway-station/henna-hands-2006.pdf>, viewed August 2018. 2 Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia , University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2010, pp.199–205. 3 Naiza Khan, email to the author, 13 May 2018. 4 Naiza Khan, ‘Artist’s notes’, in HG Masters and Elaine W Ng (eds), Naiza Khan: Works 1987–2013 , Art Asia Pacific Holdings Ltd, Hong Kong, 2013, p.53. NAIZA KHAN