Tayeba Lipi, 2019, Mirror, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York City

The human body is a social site, as much as it is a biological organism. It is both personal and public, which consciously, and at times unconsciously, participates in transmitting multiplex of meanings to us as spectators. The curated works of Ali Kazim (b.1979, Pakistan), Tayeba Lipi (b.1969, Bangladesh) and Anoli Perera (b.1962, Colombo) across this edition of ARTRA Magazine revolves around the complex readings of the body in its conveyance as a location of strife and subversion beyond a physiological fact, but as critic Bryan Turner (1996) proposes “a cultural construct which has significant political implications”. Consequently, I find a better approach to dissecting the body in the featured works of the artists may not be to question what it represents, but view it as a vehicle that is deeply embedded within a network of social, cultural and political underpinnings. 

Kazim, Lipi and Perera are bound by a shared history as they were born and brought up in South Asia reflecting cultural ties that bind them together in a sense of communal spiritedness. As featured across pages 51 to 53 and 58, Kazim’s use of the color indigo across his collection ‘Weight of Blue’ (2023) and those of Lipi’s blue skinned women depicted on page 57 are strong subtexts that refer to the pigmented form of the Lord Krishna, emanating the cosmic power seeped within the body. Inadvertently, Kazim starkly subverts Edward Said’s orientalist reading of the colored body by empowering it with divine dominance whilst Lipi emboldens the female body to one of unequivocal strength and stature. Whilst both Kazim and Lipi’s work address their own unique response to a layered history of consequential attributes of imperialism and gender discrimination that composite their shared culture, Perera boldly subverts imperialism through craft making. As featured across pages 22 to 25 and 40, the act of engaging with textile weaving and needle point art in itself defies the British academic tradition that condescended local art practices of craftmanship during the period in which Sri Lanka was colonized. In her interview for this edition of ARTRA Magazine titled ‘Influences of a Colonized Past’, she states “local art practices were seen as inferior to fine art practices because of their repetitive making of the same object and unconventional material used. Craft was imbued with ritual, religious and functional purposes rather than for aesthetic appreciation and art for art’s sake”. Whilst culminating intrinsic components that reflect the shared cultural consciousness and common rebellions against the colonizer, which to a great extent characterizes and binds the South Asian nations, the nuanced readings of the body entrenched in the works of the featured artists of this region and edition, can be approached broadly – in my opinion, from the points of their respective use of medium, gender performance and post coloniality. 

Ali Kazim, 2015, Hair Installation, Rohtas 2 Gallery, Lahore 

Material is a key component that characterizes Kazim’s enigmatic artistry. The artist, in his interview for this edition titled ‘Portraits of a Buried Past’, explains “When I was making South Asian looking portraits on paper, I was trying to create a very skin-like texture on paper through watercolour, pigment and rendering. I feel that in any work material has significant meaning”. Amongst his inventive use of medium, he surveys thehuman body through gold leaf, Japanese tissue, tracing paper and an intrinsic part of the body in itself – the hair. In Kazim’s solo show at Rohtas 2, Lahore held from Feb 19 - March 3, 2015 showcased ‘Hair Installation’ that covered most of the gallery space that comprised of hair, both human and artificial - in cylindrical form, confronting and transcending social and physical boundaries. In this instance, the artist exercises his power over the body – further enhanced through its three dimensional form of the hair installation sprawling across the space in which the hair is maneuvered to spread through numerous directions. Notably, when hair is removed from the body – the departure in itself can be considered an act of defiance in addition to acquiring a sense of control through which the artist in this instance, also evokes questions on power struggles and boundaries. 

Kazim’s exhibition ‘Suspended in Time’ (2022) alludes further to this notion of boundaries as it is a commemoration of the 75th year of the creation of Pakistan, and explores the cultural and social underpinnings that have historically characterized the people of the Indus Valley delta through striking solitary figures. Featured across pages 3, 4, 6, 9, 10 and 12, the figures who make up the eco system reflect the people of the landscape belonging to a spirited civilization, imagined by the artist through which his medium is steeped in historical significance. Painted in the tradition of those of the Bengal School’s watercolourists, Kazim’s material in the ‘Suspended in Time’ series further epitomize the body as a site for political critique, for the techniques of the wash paintings of the Bengal School of Art were born as a form of resistance in breaking free from Imperialism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in response to celebrating the heritage of the region. For instance, the featured work on the cover of the individual wearing the swan headgear represents a fundamental livelihood means of the Indus Valley community. Not only do the figurines construct a visual experience, but exhibit labels that serve to contextualize this information thereby transforming the body as sites of historical readings. What makes Kazim’s work profound, in my opinion, is his ability to draw a fervent relationship with his technique and material with the subject he explores so pensively, in a fashion almost spiritual and meditative. 

In contrast, the sculptures of Tayeba Begum Lipi function as double edged swords – in material and meaning as they critique gender roles and discriminations in Bangladesh through the motif of the body exponentially. Supporting the claim of Barbara Creed (1995) who puts forward the premise that all female bodies are threatening to patriarchal heterosexual culture – the works of Lipi that includes brassieres, bikinis and female garments mirror the multiplicity that is the female body. ‘Commodity IV’ featured on page 56 of this edition belongs to a series of acrylic paintings capturing an undressed woman’s body, wherein here, the artist experiments with razorblades and safety pins as an incorporated medium. This work that was created in 2010, forms Lipi’s critique against the commodification of the female body which she explored in great detail in her exhibition ‘This Is What I Look(ed) Like’ in 2019. 

Lipi is acclaimed for her sculpture series using razor blades, a popular reference to a tool used during childbirth. In her interview for this edition titled ‘The Feminine Paradox’, she revealed that “As a child, I saw my sisters-in-law and sisters give birth in my own house. The razor blade was used for cutting a baby from its mother. The power of this small object has been something that has stuck with me for a long time.” Lipi’s life-sized sculptures of strollers, highchairs, dresses and palm sized baby shoes reflect the biologically engineered creative aspect and the bounty of the female body in contrast to the violence women often face in Bangladesh. Reflected through safety pins and sewing-machine parts, in sizes of grand magnitude featured across pages 31 and 38– seemingly surreal, are a testament to capturing the pain and paranoia women experience. What I find mostly significant is the fact that her play with scale of rather mundane objects, bring to life the ways through domestic violence is overshadowed. Lipi astutely juxtaposes the threat of these seemingly insignificant objects, traditionally associated with beauty and accentuating the feminine. 

In many ways, Lipi’s gender critique echoes that of Judith Butler’s stance of it being a performance. Butler (1990) writes “The heterosexualization of desire requires and institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, where these are understood as expressive attributes of ‘male’ and ‘female’. The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of ‘identities’ cannot ‘exist’ - that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex”. Lipi’s works over the years have brought to light the performativity of gender roles, and often posited gender as a series of repetitive actions. For instance ‘Unveiling Womanhood’ (2019), a video projection in which Lipi, wearing a hijab created in the form of stainless steel razor blades, steadily and systematically eliminate the white crystals that conceal her face - is emblematic of the increasingly popular culture of Bangladeshi women veiling their  heads in public. The artists notes that now it is more of a fashion statement, as it was not part of the Bengali culture and perhaps a sign of cultural appropriation. 

Additionally, Lipi’s debut exhibition, ‘Toys Watching Toys’ (2010), showcased works of art questioning the gendered identity in a dominantly Islamist Bangladesh for which she collaborated with artist and partner, Rahman.. The burqa-clad mannequins of Lipi’s head made of fibreglass, piercingly confront an oil on canvas self-portrait triptych of the artist, where her face is adorned by luscious makeup and her head, uncovered. In this installation, both the figurines curiously stare at each other questioning their identity whereby also reflecting gendered identities being a performance of repeated nature. It is apparent, that the body in Lipi’s works therefore posit a sociological concern dramatically by inadvertently taking on the advocative element of liberation movements of political impact.

Anoli Perera posits the body as a site of war and strife. Foucault (1979) writes, “The power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy, that its effects of domination are attributed not to ‘appropriation’, but to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functioning’s; that one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension.” An apt interpretation to approach Perera’s work ‘Second Skin’ (2010) featured on page 40, which primarily is a captivating crimson dress reminiscent of the blood red woven with ½ inch elastic straps stitched into loops - of which the elastic use, is commonly utilized for women’s underwear thereby bringing to the forefront the artist’s protest against sexual repression and celebration of sexual freedom, within the context of the ‘darshan.’ 

Anoli Perera, 2010, Second Skin: Elastic Dress

As noted by Niharika Dinkar (2021), historical scholarship on the gaze in South Asia has remained wedded to the powerful narrative of darshan, the reciprocal gaze between the deity and the devotee, that has displayed a protean power that which Perera powerfully subverts in a sanctimonious domestic setting. Perera traces the contours of continuous changes in her body that overwhelms her, she mentioned in conversation. Impregnated by nature’s design, the dress expands and contracts releasing the scarlet fluid, the sacred waters cleansing the dirt and muck, preparing for another cycle of anticipation and pain. The body and mind remain in a constant state of fluctuation, in a state of ‘being’ never really comfortably embracing each cyclic change connecting from one to the other like a shroud of ‘being’. A monument to the monumentality of change and its anxieties expounding the fact that unlike the male body, Creed (1995) writes, “the proper female body is penetrable, changes shape, swells, gives birth, contracts, lactates and bleeds. Woman’s body reminds man of his ‘debt to nature’ and as such threatens the boundary between human and animal, civilized and uncivilized.” 

As stated by E. Scarry (1985) every act of civilization is an act of transcending the body, as reflected across the works of Kazim, Lipi and Perera, albeit as sites of trials and tribulations of political and social impetus connected to a lineage of the past. What is starkly recognizable throughout the curated works across the edition of the magazine is the tenor and tonality in which the body is approached reflecting both a tangible and ephemeral stance that the respective artists, in their idiosyncratic styles address potently. The body centers around the objects of daily use imbued in pain and paranoia whilst also bringing forth elements of strife and defiance choreographed by subversion through material, color and sexuality. Collectively, they posit the motif of the body featured across works of art in this edition as a transformative network that links both history and heritage with political undercurrents, serving to both exercise and eliminate power brazenly.