Revisiting the Popular

Curator's Note

Feet, why do I need them if I have wings to fly? – Frida Kahlo Revisiting the Popular In history, in society, in literature and in myth, beauty and violence are often tragically linked, and no one personified it better than the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo whose life has been claimed as a symbol for the pain that women suffer on that account. Celebrated in cantos and deified since her death in the fifties, her self-portraits have been used by poets and artists and litterateurs to represent a universal symbol of great joy and greater angst, an intimacy that Kanchan Chander – separated by continents and generations – clearly feels an empathy with. And so, in a basement studio in New Delhi, she brings Frida to life, now giving her many arms, now arranging sequins over her eyebrows, draping her, and the frame, in lace and in crystal, a tracery of vines running across her cheeks, now a Devi, yet again an icon of courage, and sometimes, perhaps fleetingly, of vanity. Does she have conversations with Frida? Talk with her? Share girlish secrets and laughter? For Kanchan’s images appear just as often, juxtaposed, inverted, wide-eyed, restful – never overtaking the status of her idol, but never quite subsumed by it either. On a hard day’s night, cutting, arranging, rearranging, pasting bits of paper into a layered collage, Kanchan, weary like Frida, might echo to her: “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the subject I know best.” For despite the embellishments of delicate threads and glitter and beads and baubles, there is in those shared, cherished encounters a lonely desolation, a scream of the mind building up from a void within, felt without, when paint and glue alone aren’t enough to hold the web of memories together, when a dangerous anger sweeps like a dervish, splashing colour in a rhythm and a cadence that creates and destroys universes. Then Kanchan takes pins and nails, kitchen grater and a handyman’s tools, and sews up the fabric of life in a tortured symphony. For beauty is never far from fear, or rage, or cruelty… Legends need villains, mythology has its demons, real life is painful, but Kanchan’s chosen path ignores them for the most part. In her chosen world, goddesses fly on wings of parable, enchanted gardens bloom across canvases, and beauty is meant for celebrating, not distortion. From remembered tales march the elephants of myth, Frida’s monkeys cavort next to her, and in the blossom of flowers, the open wings of a butterfly or the flutter of a rainforest bird, iridescent hues spill out. And yet again, Kanchan looks around, clutches at the shared/created world of womanhood, and sees generation, regeneration, renewal and hope in the silhouette she has secured as her own, the familiar torso, such an accepted, unquestioned part of temple architecture – venerated there, celebrated by mankind, then rejected when it no longer serves any purpose. Served by poetry – which Kanchan casts calligraphically, but also nostalgically – the torso is a representation of nature, emblematic of the sap of life itself, but equally a measure of the ruthless claim of time and tide which renders it betrayed, leading to a crouching sense of loss and resulting in a miasma of loneliness and failure. Detached thus, the torso, the figure, the woman – lover, mother – the nurtured and the nurturer, creates unchanging new-old fables, for in its beginning itself its end was written. If art is therapeutic, for Kanchan there is an evolving tactile feel to her work as she “designs” – her choice of phrase – her work around a life of intense experiences, of wholesale bazaars where in decrepit lanes, women come to buy the bits and baubles that lend joy to their fragile existence – feathers and jewels, happiness and a song – in snatches of time. But like a bright-eyed magpie, she scours the city for found objects too, so that the terrible cost of beauty is paid in a pride of scars that resolutely stitch, hammer, hold and bind lives in a tapestry that still celebrates life and living. Fertile, sensual, mothering, giving, women morph into the male of the species as they accent a changing world that leaves them bereft of companion, lover, partner, nurturer, provider. In Kanchan’s anthromorphic world, is this a glimpse into a terrifying future of absences? The decorativeness hints at fragility, the steel is grit, but is there a void that will result in greater lonelinesses? As Kanchan plays peek-a-boo with the truth, for a moment you look into a seared heart, and then it seals/heals again. Alice is no longer in Wonderland and the looking mirror reflects only that which is held before it. Between fantasy and reality, between the discernible and the unseen, Kanchan’s aesthetic journey has unravelled to a point where her glossy Fridas and their companion actresses – “women of strength” she calls them, even though they are trapped in heart-achingly fragile webs of the showbiz world – are replaced, as her temper takes her, to an abstract world where the known becomes unknown, and there is no more naked vulnerability. The diva is wished away, the woman is no longer the goddess of all things, and meditative silences are replaced by a restlessness of form that bubbles, lava-like, assuming shapes that change, the suggestion of a winged creature having escaped beyond the frame to leave behind a whirl of chaos… With pin and plaster, then, she has created works in mixed media, as also of sculptures installed at the site, compendium pieces that hold together as only life’s breath can, for each is complete in itself, but whole only when in an assembly. Once upon a time, a long while ago – for this is how stories must be told – a child entered her world, both the lived and the painted, and memories of that precious gift traversed her landscapes, now glimpsed in some animal, now gained in strength and become her protector. That child, growing up still, but grown up nevertheless, is part of an experiment where mother and son collaborate on a project that has evolved into a site-specific installation, the direction of which will be fully known only when the exhibition opens, part of a series on installations Kanchan has prepared meticulously, consisting of several delicate watercolours celebrating femininity and decorated – as women must be – with things of beauty, sequins and songs, but also with safety pins and paper, nails and pegs… And here a bizarre conversation that you must imagine between Kanchan and Frida… Frida: “I’m pained, my darling – why drive nails into women who have been crucified long before Christ on the cross?” Kanchan: “Because after you died, my sweet, and Diego River wore his regret on his sleeve, all virtue and strength passed away too.” Frida: “But there are men, my dear, to do a man’s work.” Kanchan: “There are men, true, but these are men who go to beauty parlours and coif themselves, and wear dainty clothes.” Frida: “So what happens to the women?” Kanchan: “Women will be women, they’re beautiful in themselves, but they still embellish themselves. But then, because a man’s work must also be done, they do a plumber’s job and an electrician’s task, they repair, and make, and break, pay bills, stand in queues…” At this point, perhaps they giggle, or lament, the passing of history. And perhaps Kanchan re-paints a self-portrait of Frida and intersperses a clever photograph of herself into the frame, and reaches for a jewelled pin with which to complete the ensemble. Yet, I think, Frida might have admired Kanchan’s spirit and feistiness, her triumph over tragedy and courage over misfortune, her gaiety and spirituality, her rejection of rituals and the fetters of society. She has found her wings and shackled herself to them, flying above the surface just high enough to be detached from the world she paints but yet inhabits, where goddesses both succumb and triumph – strong in spirit if not in limb – but when they regenerate, why is it always to be kindled by the same flame that burned them, returning like moths to the light, in an endless cycle of maya and karma? In that wishful, wanting world of ephemeral desires, Kanchan revists the popular, creating a cosmos where the worlds segue, in which there are no divisions – and no Dilip Kumars and Marlon Brandos either – to gasp at the haunting images of Madhubala and Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit and Audrey Hepburn. Instead, there are the bursts of a remembered song heard in a market overcrowded by women come to create a rosary of happiness with the help of kitschy roses and ribbons. And with those and a smile, a glue stick, a brush and some paints, Kanchan looks around her, looks at the mirror, looks at Frida Kahlo, and then sets to work. For beauty, and tragedy, both pass, unless the chronicler is at hand to note that passing moment and to return it to the cupboard of our collective memories. Kishore Singh