It is said that homes are essentially formed in relationship to movement and this intrinsically involves attachment and mobility, fixation and loss, and the transgression and enforcement of boundaries[1]. Both the imagined notions of the ‘home’ and ‘homelessness’ has a territory within which it moves and works, a place we attach ourselves to. Shruti Mahajan, through her paintings, photographs, assemblages and installations, engages with these very questions through her own trajectories of migration and ancestral memories. Through the history of objects, the artist remembers, creating intimate visual archives that bring in narratives of belonging, identity and nation-hood and the conditions of familiarity/estrangement of our present times.

Mediating between empirical and conceptual trajectories, Shruti constructs paintings that speak of a sense of contingency and distancing, the hyphenated space between the home and the world. As visual archives to define her relationship between the past and the present, the artist focuses on rooms and objects from her ancestral home of her maternal family in Central India, collecting memories of five generations who lived in this place. Like snap-shots or short novellas, these paintings are in a documentary mode, depicting beds, doors, room corners, old furniture, verandahs, fans, mosquito nets and electrical switch-boards. But these rooms are also devoid of people, the artist looks at an inheritance from the outside into an inside full of absent-presences. She sometimes puts these old architectural objects within the contours of an envelope, to perhaps post it to an address that is intricately woven with her identity. Layers of colours flow into each other, dabs of memory punctuate the white paper, in wiry lines and skewed perspectives that trace time and interrogate the notions of the self and the image.  As a reconstructive process, what is most interesting is what the artist leaves aside, particularly in her use of white or negative space which often alludes to absences; the home transforming into a mental phenomenon, an imagined, radiant, existential metaphor.

Place/Memory

Envelope/Box

Given her familial experiences of living in military cantonments, Shruti maps another kind of a life which is bordered and structured by state laws and surveillance. Identities are camouflaged, soldiers are often separated from their families and cantonments become sanitized enclosures where each person is a number. These numbers become platoon, brigade, battalion and corps, there is a longing for home-posting and relationships are often lived through posted letters sealed in envelopes. In these black/white drawings, the artist opens, stretches and folds the envelope and if one looks at it in its three-dimensionality, it takes the form of a home with roofs and walls, closing onto each other. Memories travel through letters, lines meet lines in folded paper, shaded in grey nostalgia, the residues of the self glued in language. What does one remember or discard?

The interfaces of place and belonging and living in transient spaces, homes fit into boxes and crates, the acts of filling and emptying spaces and creating new timetables for each new city is intrinsic to the artist’s life. In her paintings done in a residency in Germany, these emerge like footnotes or sub-texts of a larger narrative, blank yellow walls, piled up boxes/suitcases at the corners of the canvas and outlines of chairs abstracted of the seats connote a sense of de-familiarization, the body/self in transit – a signifier of a migrant’s domesticity.

Mahajan’s paintings evoke a certain minimalist language that is denoted through the seriality of domestic objects, architectural signs, and thin tonal subtleties that bring to mind the work of Giorgio Morandi, Nasreen Mohamedi and Zarina Hashmi. Her pictorial solutions are achieved through planar and linear modes, distilled of detail, the line marking paths of a moving point, looking at ways of life left behind and internal worlds of longing.

Territory/Borders

Working with the experiences of conflicted geo-political zones and notions of power, Mahajan moves beyond intimate paintings to assemblages, installations and video. Here too they emerge like sub-texts through objects and clothes that soldiers use and wear in their daily lives. The colour of khaki that is used for military uniforms becomes the tonal register that connects these assemblages to the larger political system of militarized borders, identity and nation-hood. Commando shirts, socks, gloves, and boots hung from threads and hangers, trace existential questions of colonial history and civilizational conflict that the Indian nation has been witness to and which cleaves its political map. Collecting this material from the daily bazaars of the cantonment of Secundarabad, Mahajan brings in a sense of loneliness and disquiet, the absent body appearing through stitched contours of feet and hands on gloves and socks. Emblems and symbols of rank and honour within the military establishment along with the power of heavy military boots, act as visual signs of violence, fear, security, war and death. Can borders ever turn to bridges?

In the video, ‘Home-Front’, Mahajan explores verbal and visual imagery, juxtaposing the intimacy of the ‘home’ with the military dictum of ‘front’ which alludes to territorial borders. The video is made out of live footage in Baramulla, Kashmir and introduces two people from the valley who is witness to the strained relationship between the state and its citizens. Kashmir has a history of its youth joining militant groups in conflict with Indian forces and this intangible and psychological importance of territory permeates into everyday lives. The artist, during her stay in the cantonment there, was not allowed to step out into civilian space. The narratives in the video emerge out of her encounters with Wajid Khan, a former chef who works as a tailor and Zohara who is a housewife married to an a police jawan. Only the hands within the film frame are seen, doubling into two screens – on one side, Wajid, with great patience and care, irons a military uniform; on the other, Zohara lovingly draws her land/locality outside the parameters of the cantonment, describing its beauty amidst enemy bunkers and constant fear.

Maps of the Indian nation-state that emerged out of a workshop have contours which are nebulous interpretations of nation-hood, where human behavior is shaped through volatile and contested landscapes. The stark black/white photographs of monumental gates and barbed wire fencing try to make sense of the distrust, identity battles and surveillance regulations that force an apparently free individual to feel safe through control. The entry and exit points of the gate are the first markers of defining one’s identity, to be included or excluded, to be the friend or the enemy. Mahajan, in her subtle, understated style, works with questions of visuality, readability and the politics of perception, presenting a field of dialogical signs where seeing alters what is being seen, embedding power as a socialized and everyday phenomenon.

Amrita Gupta Singh

[1]Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortie,  Berg 2003