CURATORIAL NOTE:

The exhibition Punctum 1: A Critical Look at The Body in South Asian Photography examines pivotal corporeal moments that have been captured within a South Asian milieu. These fragments of frozen time caught on camera present “puncturing” acts of "momentary pleasure" (jouissance), or disturbances that might have not been previously viewed, that suddenly become visible. Ronald Barthes defines this moment in his book ‘Camera Lucida’ as the “punctum”; a kind of piercing that shoots out like an arrow grabbing the viewers’ attention. Punctum 1 is an attempt to highlight a few such moments that allude to the South Asian body by engaging the work of Sheba Chhachhi (Delhi), Anita Dube (Delhi), Hetain Patel (Nottingham, UK) and Tejal Shah (Mumbai). Arshiya Lokhandwala March 2010

SHEBA CHHACHHI

NOTES BY THE ARTIST In these photographs I explore the sensuality of ageing, of a beauty and pleasure that confronts conventional attitudes to the bodies of older women. They are part of an ongoing photographic exploration, which seeks to recuperate the female body from dominant social, market and mediatic representations. These photos were made in collaboration with the subject inviting the viewer to enter an intimacy that is not voyeuristic. Sheba Chhachhi New Delhi, March 2009 BIOGRAPHY An installation artist and photographer, Sheba Chhachhi’s works address transformation, marginality and the play between the mythic and social in the context of gender, representation, urban ecologies, violence and visual culture. Her work has been included in several international art exhibitions, biennales and triennials and many publications. She has exhibited widely in India, Europe, Japan, South and North America, and has published writings, given talks and conducted workshops, research and projects relating to these concerns. Group exhibitions in the last three years include: ‘Urban Manners 2’, Sao Paulo, Brazil, ‘Where three dreams cross’, Whitechapel, London, UK, ‘Against Exclusion’, Moscow Biennale, Russia, VentoSul Biennale, Brazil, Asian Art Biennale, Taiwan, ‘Republic of illusions’, Gallery Kitzinger, Vienna, ’Dreaming in Public’, Soulflower, Bangkok., ‘New Narratives from India’ at Zimmerli Museum & Chicago Cultural Centre, USA, and ‘Where in the World ‘& ‘Still Moving Image’ at Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India Solo exhibitions 2008-2009 : the public art project ‘The Water Diviner’, 48 Degrees, New Delhi, ‘Between Stories’, Galleria Paolo Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi, Milan and ‘Winged Pilgrims & Other Creatures’, at Wash Gallery Chicago and BosePacia, New York.

ANITA DUBE

NOTES/ EYE PHOTOS In the summer of 1999 I made my first experiment in photography, fixing the votive eyes I had been installing on walls up until now, on my own body. This did not come about in a planned studio context, but as a ritualistic action in the domestic space one morning. I glued the eyes on my palms, recalling the application of ‘mehndi’ in the spirit of ‘bhakti’ and ‘shringar’, but also as a contemporary performance gesture involving ambiguous movevents. My friend C K Rajan, an amateur photographer, was roped into shooting; following my instructions on the frame and the light I wanted. This was almost a banal exercise for me as the ‘subject’ and the ‘auteur’, until I had the processed negative and contact sheet in my hands. Then, the marvel, magic and materiality of photography was revealed to me in a moment I will never forget. This was about discovering for myself, my particular relationship with photography, outside its anthropological, documentary, journalistic, advertisement moorings. Anita Dube New Delhi, March, 2010 BIOGRAPHY

1979 B.A. (honors), History, University of Delhi 1982 M.F.A., Art Criticism, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda The artist lives and works in New Delhi. Dube has show widely internationally and in India, and her recent shows include Beyond Globalization, Beyond Art Space, Beijing, 2009, Santhal Family, Positions around one Indian Sculpture, MuKHA Museum, Antwerp, 2008, The Audience and the Eavesdropper, Phillips de Pury, London in recent years. Her solo exhibitions have taken place at Bose Pacia Gallery, New York 2007, Inside Out, Bombay Art Gallery, Mumbai, Phantoms of Liberty, Galerie Almine Rech, Paris 2006. Gallery Ske, Bangalore in the recent years. The artist works in several media including photography, video and installation and performance art.

VIA NEGATIVA-- Recognizes (philosophically and materially), the first trace of a photograph on the negative. That intermediary, liminal ground through which every analog photograph must pass- like a rite of passage. The eye travels through the white void inside the open mouth; then through the carnal grip of hunger that bites into it; and then, via this negative terrain, emerges as the luminous moon inside the mouth. In the photographic negative, the black of the pupil appears white. Such chance elements are the djinns that release fantastic suggestions and stories….One such story is: while Krishna was narrating the ‘Gita’ to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, he sensed Arjuna’s doubt. At that point he opened his mouth and the whole cosmos (brahmand) was visible inside.

REMEMBERING EKLAVYA, connects to another story. While Bhishma was teaching Archery to the Kaurava and Pandava princes, a lower caste boy Eklavya, was observing these lessons from behind the bushes. When the time came to test their skills, an open competition was held in which Eklavya defeated the princes. Even a great teacher like Bhishma could not let this pass: as guru dakshina he asked Eklavya to cut off his thumb, so that he would never compete with the princes. A framing accident had cut off my thumb in the shoot! This triggered the memory of the story. At the point and place of the ‘cut’, the image could be ‘joined’ to itself again and again- another beautiful accident! The initial ‘doubling’ became a multiplication of the same image- a fascinating undecipherable script- a celebration of collectivity and marginality; at that very site of exclusion.

SEA CREATURE simply enjoys the act of ‘doubling’: the expansion of its energy –its fission- its marine otherworldliness- its sculptural qualities.

TEJAL SHAH

NOTES BY THE ARTIST ON HYSTERIA: ICONOGRAPHY FROM THE SALPETRIER SERIES

I have been working with the body as a gendered and sexualized entity since the beginning of my oeuvre with particular interest in the breaking apart of the closely guarded categories of male/female and, what and who might constitute masculinity or femininity. My protagonists are often women, transgendered or transsexual people who have been marginalized in the historical narrative but push forward in unlikely directions in the performative scenarios I set up.

Long influenced by the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1899), I first developed the performance-photo series Encounter(s) (2006) as a starting point to look at hysteria, urban loneliness and physical contact or lack of touch. When I was an artist-in-residence in Paris in 2007, I came across the book Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpétrière by French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman. I was immediately taken in by the complex intersection of the invention of photography and it’s use in the colonial enterprise from the mid 19th century as very well analysed by Malek Alloula in The Colonial Harem for instance; the performative nature of these archival photographs - in the nexus between the model/patient, doctor, photographer and the post-renaissance assertion of science trying to establish itself as a credible authority. The archival photographs seem so implausible, even humorous at first, but soon reveal their dark side of a painful history.

Working along with Paris based dancer and choreographer Marion Perrin who also appears in some of these photographs, I began to develop this series of auto-portraits presented here by recreating some of images from the archive. They are probing as they displace the subject, physician and photographer with the artist playing all these roles. It was very hard to embody these images and history. As I researched further, I realised that a lot of these images were taken just after shock treatment was given to the patient in her mouth or the sub-orbital nerves were singed in the case of the photophobic hysteric.

As an aside, here is my favourite anecdote, which encapsulates this photo series: "One of the patients was suspected of stealing some photographs from the hospital, but she indignantly denied the charge. One morning [Mr.] Richer found the suspected thief with her hand in the drawer containing the photographs, having already concealed some of them in her pocket. [Mr.] Richer approached her. She did not move; she was fixed-she was transformed into a statue, so to speak. The blows on the gong made in the adjoining ward had rendered her cataleptic at the very moment when, away from the observation of all, she committed the theft."

BIOGRAPHY Tejal Shah (b. 1979) is a visual artist working with video, photography, performance, sound and installation. Her work, like herself, is feminist, queer and political. Her protagonists are often women and transgender or transsexual people – historically marginalized – the push forward in unlikely directions in the performance narratives that she sets up. She has exhibited widely in museums, galleries and film festivals including, Lost and Found – Queerying the Archive, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen 2009, Saturday Live, Tate Modern, London 2006, and many more. Solo exhibitions include “What are You?”, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York and Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai 2006. She is the recipient of the Sanskriti Award in Visual Arts, 2009. In 2003-04, she co-founded, organized and curated Larzish – India’s premier International Film Festival of Sexuality and Gender Plurality. Shah grew up in central India, Chattisgarh and eventually moved to Mumbai in 1995. She holds a BA in photography from RMIT, Melbourne and has been an exchange scholar at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Approaching Attack / Onset of the Attack (Diptych), Tejal Shah From Hysteria - Iconography from the Salpetrier Series

Archival b/w digital print on fine art paper, Edition 5 + 2AP, 2007 – 09

81 x 61 cm each

HETAIN PATEL

NOTES BY THE ARTIST, March, 2009 Nothingham Two of the works Patel With Cow Skin, 2007 1&2, 2007 the artist has continued his ongoing use of Kanku in his work. He finds this red pigment to be fertile source material. In the U.K a red Kanku dot on the forehead becomes a strong signifer of Indian-ness to western eyes. Having grown up seeing it’s use in a number of Hindu rituals, Hetain was instantly drawn to using it to mark the body in a more overt manner. He is interested in what it means to mark himself with this pigment, pasting another skin onto his inherited Indian one. In addition the markings of the Swastika and the cross stem from his ongoing preoccupation with language and signs. The Swastika is of course a symbol that has been used in the East for thousands of years and remains widely used in a number of Indian religions. However as someone brought up in the West, Hetain still feels he cannot shake off the stigma Nazi Germany attached to it. And yet this symbol is very close to the English National flag, the St George’s Cross, made up of a red cross on a white background. In the pieces Swastika, 2005 and Patel With Cow Skin, the symbolism extends to religious signifiers. The arms held out in Swastika referencing Christian symbolism becomes an outstretched seating posture in Patel With Cow Skin, in which Patel rests on a leather sofa, made from the skin of the animal Hinduism holds sacred. Hetain sits firmly here in the undefined middle ground between the two cultures of his upbringing. In the Patel With Cow Skin diptych, the silver sheen on the artists body is made up of text- The word PATEL intricately written by his own hand in a four hour long self imposed ritual. Like with all the signs Hetain marks onto his skin, it is a temporary identity, ready to be wiped off by the very hand that marked it.

BIOGRAPHY

Having graduated from Nottingham Trent’s Fine Art course in the U.K in 2003, Hetain Patel received the Decibel award from Arts Council England, East Midlands in 2004. Since then his photography, video and live works have been shown nationally and internationally at venues including Tate Britain, London Printworks and further a field in the U.S.A (Bodhi Art), China, India, and across Europe. Following his shortlist last year for The Satyajit Ray Short Film Award, celebrated at BAFTA, his new live piece TEN is due to go on national tour later this year.Hetain’s practice interrogates various sensory forms of language, communication and cultural identity. Often using his own body as a site for these discussions he strives to find a connection with his heritage through the exploration of linguistics, rituals and Indian classical music. Always keen to share his experience he currently lectures at Nottingham University and Nottingham Trent University in Fine Art and Digital Photography. Running parallel to this Hetain is currently serving as a board member at Déda, Derby’s dance centre and as a member of Regional Council for Arts Council England, East Midlands. Hetain has undertaken three substantial residences over the past five years, including Lakeside Arts Centre Nottingham, 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, North Lincolnshire and his latest at 501 Arts Space in Chongqing, China, where he collaborated with artists, choreographers and musicians.

Patel with Cow Skin 1, Hetain Patel Lambda Print, 2007 76cm x 92cm, Edition ¼ + 2AP

Patel with Cow Skin 2, Hetain Patel Lambda Print, 2007 76cm x 92cm, Edition 2/4 + 2 AP

tel

6.2 x 97.8 cm, Edition ¼ + 2AP

Swastika, Hetain PaC-TYPE PRINT,2005 7