Connecting the Dots: The art of Manisha Gera Baswani
Healing (2017) - Manisha Gera Baswani. Photo credit: Gallery Espace
Manisha Gera Baswani’s recent exhibition speaks of healing and the intricate process of creation, where the art deeply links the connections between pain, grief, and beauty.
Artist Manisha Gera Baswani’s oeuvre of work has achieved a smooth dexterity: it’s bold and beautiful, while also delicate and detailed in the finest possible fashion. Many of Baswani’s works recently displayed at the exhibition … and the dots connect now at the Gallery Espace speak of healing and the intricate process of creation, where pain, grief, and beauty are deeply linked. These links are so well depicted in the compositions of her artworks that it would not be difficult to look at the manner in which Baswani has made peace with each of these feelings at a time.
Interestingly, Baswani’s works are also a mitigation between historical moments and political embroil that needs to be recorded and recognised not only for its aesthetic appeal, but also for the volume it adds to the dialogues on violence, modernism, and, of course, the arts.
Safar - Journey (2019) - Manisha Gera Baswani. Photo credit: Gallery Espace
As we step inside New Delhi’s Gallery Espace, we are greeted by a large black gauche on paper work with meticulous pin pricks outlining the diagrams of the heart from various angles. Dil ki baat is a painting that almost sets a multifaceted tone of this exhibition invoking the stages of healing that the artist has drawn from her personal experience. The painting is deliberately placed opposite to a large bright-red and yellow oil-on-canvas called Shikhar. Another digital-work with pin incisions, ink, and pen, titled A Mandu summer afternoon, is staged on a side-wall dividing the entry space in two sections. The placement of these art pieces together makes a special statement of ‘conflict and resolution’ encountered by the artist during the process of creation.
One of the highpoints of the show also revolved around the installation, Guldasta, made of three palm branches and moli threads. This piece literally hangs by a thread occupying a central space by the staircase of the gallery. It is visible from any point of the site. Baswani says that she had found the palm branch a long time ago and had, somehow, moved it to her studio. Later, it dawned on her that she could create something out of it. So, she sat weaving moli threads around the tendrils of the branch for over a year. Sangat, a similar installation of three seeds that she had acquired while walking in the forest, was also staged on the site. She has included crochet work to its leaves. To her, these are bits of nature that nature has discarded and she—as a human being—intervened in the processes of nature.
The violence of slicing, cutting, and sewing can have various outcomes. These very acts are visible in Baswani’s technique of creation: Her exhibition particularly engages with these surgical acts as a means to create or to give life—whereby, her form of violence leads to creation.
This may be an important revelation of Baswani’s artistic practice, as a creator that is equivalent to nature. Nature, too, is equal to creation. Hence nature and creation are in sync in her practice. This dialogue becomes more vivid with diptych artworks of crosswires that end and begin in rows. These watercolour paperworks also look like scripts that were once more visible, but are now distant. The dialogue here is especially pertinent given Baswani’s previous accounts, where she has stated how she finds it important to reimagine the narrative of India-Pakistan boundary in her art practice, because of her grandmother who had left her whole world behind and fled to India during the Partition.
Much later, in her travels to Lahore, Baswani witnessed her ancestral house and also collected scripts in Chinese and Urdu. Thereby, we see the soul dialogue captured through dots forming wires as boundaries that may mean nothing in isolation. Again, when looked at on a frame, they look like green grass growing out of a white or black background.
Ricocheting across stories of boundaries and Partition, Baswani also exposes her viewers to her love for textile and South-Asian motifs. The chikankari artworks are exquisitely composed in two different ways. Jatayu and the garden of roses is an exquisite engagement with the art of chikankari: here, she is able to reimagine the mythological references through chikankari and work on the details on a digital-work with pin incisions, ink, and pen. There are a few more elaborate pieces in which the artist has shown her love for this approach on textile, staged against the light for viewers to look closely at the flawless dedication.
Guldasta (2021) - Manisha Gera Baswani. Photo credit: Gallery Espace
A curatorial note by Bharti Chaturvedi accompanying this exhibition stated that, after Baswani’s husband had undergone a medical surgery a few years ago, Baswani found herself wondering at the violence that the body is capable of enduring in order to survive or remedy a condition. The violence of slicing, cutting, and sewing can have various outcomes. These very acts are visible in Baswani’s technique of creation: Her exhibition particularly engages with these surgical acts as a means to create or to give life—whereby, her form of violence leads to creation.
Simultaneously, some paperwork with gauche and incisions or cuts have been staged against the light. Baswani calls one of her works golden grief, the idea behind which is to look at the ‘gold’ her grief is able to produce. These paperworks are a brutal insight to Baswani’s artistic trysts that were also involved with the healing process of her husband.
Several other important artworks do mark this show in its esteem as we look at Basant, a white paperwork with pin incisions. It has a very tranquil message, almost calming. A new skin, an installation of three broken ceramic plates put together with crochet work makes another thoughtful impact, where we are given a closer look at this process of healing.
There are a few more colourful works that set an important tone to the show. Healing presents watercolour, gauche, acupuncture pins, where pin incisions on paper are juxtaposed by a group of needles attached by a thread on white background. Other canvases, such as Safar, worked with watercolour, gouache, pin incisions, and embroidery threads, create quite an appeal too. These paintings keep transgressing between the artist’s thought processes and the result is quite affective as it does evoke a strong feeling in the viewers. The exhibition showcases more similar elegant works in smaller sizes as well.
It is quite evident that show’s designer Prima Kurien had to be extremely cautious while laying out the narrative of Baswani’s accumulated works of the past decade. The use of lights around the gallery space definitely needs a special mention as it definitely adds more clarity and depth to the collection.
Therefore, looking at Baswani’s works is to look at depths, and the dots that effectively become a blur. Her personal engagement with material culture and artist techniques are remarkably invocative of the modern South Asian invocation of the minimalist. This could be because of her interest in the miniature art forms that hide behind the obscured thin lines that linger on canvases or papers quite close to the description of veins, possibly because of her longing to articulate time, space, and the aesthetics of belonging.
At the end of the show, as I walked with Baswani, I found myself asking the artist directly if she could still connect to this display. There was only a swift, prompt reply. “No.”
***
Satarupa Bhattacharya is an independent cultural practitioner, associated with academic journals on visual and cultural studies. She is currently working on academic publications and a novella. You can find her on Instagram: @sattybatty.
