Expanding Perspectives: Interview With Sheela Gowda

You mentioned that having trained as a painter in Bangalore at the Ken School of Art, and after studying in Baroda and Santiniketan under the late KG Subramanyan, you went on to pursue further studies in London and Paris. Could you expand on your experience in Europe? What it was like to return home?

When I was away from India, I was able to view my country with a certain distance. For example, to experience being a minority—what does it mean? It made me very vulnerable. At the same time, I really enjoyed being anonymous in England. You could just walk on the street, and nobody knew you, nobody cared about you—just that anonymity was liberating somehow. In India, you have your relatives, your friends, your neighbors—or you were just a “woman” who got looked at. In England, you were not necessarily made aware of your body, and you could just be, although you did become more aware of your race. In that way, you became more sensitive to other minorities somewhere else, and this experience has impacted my work since.

When I moved back to India, I took a job at an art college that had just been set up in a rural part of the country. It wasn’t the best experience, but for me it was an opportunity to officially leave home and figure out for myself what it means to be in a specific place culturally, socially, politically. It was also the time where in the early 1990s, they had started communal violence in India and the right wing was becoming stronger and stronger, which has now finally resulted in the populist government. At that time, the violence wasn’t linked to a specific ideology, but it was being stealthily pushed into our everyday lives. As we now know, I’d say our fears were well grounded.

Your work is often described to be in line with post-minimalist abstraction, with your practice going beyond the two-dimensional framework, and your use of materials that break down the hierarchies of high and low art. What pushed you in this direction?

I don’t begin my work with a minimalist agenda; while taking away the excess from the piece, the work becomes minimal. Painting became a limited medium to express all the angst we were experiencing in this violent period of the ’90s with the Hindu and Muslim communal riots. At this point the idea of using cow dung came to me, and it was a radical change in my work.

If the animal is not fed all kinds of things, cow dung is actually a very clean material, like papier-mâché. In India, women handle it every day. Cow dung came in many forms in my work: first I used it in liquid form as the color sepia, adjusting the material to my painting practice, but eventually the material moved from the canvas to the wall; from two-dimensionality to three-dimensionality. And when I moved the material from the walls to the floor, the work became about space. From then on, my canvas was the space itself, and the material.

Once I moved back to India, I questioned my poetic imaginations that I had when I was younger, and became a little more grounded in depicting real figures and my environment. My work became about the village Yelwal around me, and I created some satirical works, such as paintings that showed women bouncing water pots on their bottoms, like Charlie Chaplin did in some of his movies. There was also a well behind my house, and many things happened around it. It was a giver of life sustenance, but it was also a place where women jumped into if they wanted to commit suicide. In my work then, the well became a symbol for both life-giving and life-taking.

Did the shift toward political themes happen organically with the range of your medium?

At a certain point, I wanted my work to reflect the politics of my environment. It started with cow dung, which is a material that is so representative of non-violence, but the images that were made were about violence and sensuality. The so-called poor materials that I use have ruggedness and rawness that appeal to me, and I use them because they are there. It has a sociopolitical resonance for me, and even if I had passed by the material many times before, it is only when I “recognized” something within it that I gravitated toward using it in my own work.

Many of your works allow the audience to ruminate and reflect on the ideas that you are sharing. They are a bodily experience: some immersive, like Darkroom (2006), and some olfactory, like the ash used in Collateral (2007/2011) at Documenta 12. I was wondering if you wanted to deliberately overwhelm our senses so that the experiences become amplified when we engage with the work.

Olfactory components are not a conscious decision in my work—it really comes from just the choice of material. I can’t help it if cow dung smells. I can’t help it if incense smells. Incense actually doesn’t even have a smell. The original iteration is just coal, charcoal powder and tree bark powder—and the bark, which is to bond the materials together, is from a particular tree that has a stickiness to it, which can feel like dough if you rub it in your hands. The scent is a chemical fragrance that is added in later, and I honestly don’t like the smell of incense, but what I’m interested in is the forms that they leave behind. They have a certain kind of pathos—to life, to ending, to how time played out. Something that was there becomes ash, and becomes very vulnerable. Ashes are a residual material, in the most final way.

Your process-oriented approach of rolling, arranging and burning incense, to create the intricate fragmented patterns in Collateral (2007/2011) seems somewhat cathartic, and alludes to a sense of loss while referring to the violence on our landscape and in our society. Could you tell me more about your use of incense in this work and its significance?

I was actually looking for charcoal powder when I came across incense in 2001, to create the work Breaths (2002). My husband was helping me to mash up coal, and it was a difficult task—so I went looking for some powdered charcoal instead.

Breaths is a very personal work for me. It’s one of the most important works where I’ve addresses death in the most personal way, but it’s minimal and abstract. I channeled whatever was happening out there in the world, and combined it with my own experiences. It makes you feel the trauma of a victim in a very different way. You question what it means.

The base for Collateral was also an important part of the work, because without the steel mesh, the incense would not burn. The work looks like aerial views from up above, but at our eye-level, it also resembles tombstones. There is a presence and solidity, in contrast to the ash itself.

It is fascinating that you use “residual materials,” whether it is from an industry, like the used tar drums or human hair that is left over from auctions, or from nature, like cow dung. They are rife with social, religious and political meanings. But your use of the material does not impart overt activism. Is it the history and the symbolic meaning that catches your initial interest in using these materials?

I guess my work has always been about what’s happening within society in terms of the previously mentioned violence, and what death means when it happens to somebody close to you. And how do you bring together those two ideas? In 2001, the Bhuj earthquake happened in Gujarat, Western India, and in 2002 was the mass genocide in the same state. These are two very different things in terms of violence, and meant very different things in terms of death. Also, I lost my brother at that time, so there was a link that happened in terms of personal experience and the death of multitudes.

Let’s talk about scales and space. You manipulate architectural elements to work in your favor. How do you consider spatial dimension and volume when creating an installation? And do you think space is always politically charged?

Space can be political, as in Drip Field (2009) and Some Place (2005), which were shown at the ninth edition of the Sharjah Biennale, but the work is also spatial for its own sake. You are taking into account what is around that space, the people within it and their perspective. Often, it’s my own confrontation with the space. Sometimes it is very neutral, sometimes the space is already very loud, because the architects have put a stamp of their own personality within the space. There are all kinds of things, and they all have their own mysteries. The way they are has its own history.

For the work And Tell Him of My Pain (1998/2001), you said that the space was a canvas. You spoke of how the idea and the work necessitate “labor.” Could you tell me more about what compelled you to this private performance you created in your studio, and how it was significant that the body of the thread repeatedly goes through the eye of the needle? Was it a meditative practice?

It was certainly meditative, because I was covering a distance of eight kilometers over 14 hours a day, up and down my studio for three months. It became a personal ritual—a repetition of something. I had started it in my studio, and I couldn’t just stop midway. My husband was there, and although no one was there to see the work since I didn’t announce it as a performance, we recorded the creation process on video. It’s a sculptural line that was not bought but made with kum kum pigment—a very earthy red. What excited me was the needle going through the very body that it is creating. I made two versions of it; one was for Documenta 12 in 2007, and one was for the Walker Art Center.

I was interested in your experience in Hong Kong creating the show at Para Site in 2015. You didn’t go into much detail at the M+ “Reorient” symposium, but you mentioned visiting the textiles market to select each fabric pattern for your site-specific installation. For Those of Whom (2014) at São Paulo, again, you sourced a local material that has a history and intensity. Were you hoping the public would recognize and understand the history of the material as well?

For the work in Hong Kong, I was questioning what does the word “excess” mean? The idea didn’t come to me until I landed in the city, and felt that it embodied the term for me. I wanted to explore the excess of variety that the locals are accustomed to.

For Those of Whom (2014) at São Paulo, I sourced the rubber from the Amazon because of its global reference. Due to the shortage of natural rubber in America, workers from the Northeastern part of Brazil were forced to harvest latex in the Amazon during the second world war, and their descendants—the “rubber soldiers”—still live there. It is true that the history of the material is what initially pulled me to use the material, but the work I create exists for itself once it is out of my hands. There is no explanation of the material’s history to accompany the work. Not everybody who visited the exhibition could know what the material means in the context of Brazil.

Being at the forefront of contemporary Indian art, you’ve inspired younger generations, and you mentioned that while getting to know the community, you’ve been involved with certain art developments in Bangalore. How is the art scene changing in Bangalore?

Bangalore is known for its artist initiatives—the art community in my hometown is not overly competitive and the people are very generous with each other. But recently we had some issues with the government over the Venkatappa Art Gallery. They wanted to give it away because of some crony capitalist maneuvers to a Bangalore-based art dealer and collector, so that he could build new property and prop his own collection in there. He was promising to keep it open for artists, but of course, it would be at his mercy afterwards. The community was agitated and we fought against it—and we won! It is also partially our fault because as artists, we had neglected to use that space. I had my first solo shows there, and many artists used it, but at a certain point, art moved out to the streets and other unconventional spaces. We now organize exhibitions there every four or five days, because the best way to keep a space going is to keep it occupied.

Julee WJ Chung is the assistant editor of ArtAsiaPacific.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.