Artist Aishwarya Sultania explores the linkages with an unfamiliar space, culture and language. By Ayushi Sharma
One cannot deny the fact that art connects people across borders, be it geographically or culturally. Artist Aishwarya Sultania believes that people should be able to communicate beyond languages, nationality, culture and bond at a human level. She investigates the implications with an unfamiliar space, culture and language. The exhibition Unwarping Time untangles the artist’s visual memories seeped in childhood impressions of India and tinted with a year-long encounter with Paris. The works are a result of an eight-year long studio work completed between India and France.
She describes one of her works, Empty exposures from circle to square, which is a photograph on Ilford paper and is a study of the effect of time on an empty slide that captures two circular entities moving towards each other. She tries to depict a swift movement between those two bodies which creates two pulsating trail-lines and it feels as if they are destined to chase each other in an empty rectangular space.
A similar pattern is visible in another work, Excerpts from my painting, where Aishwarya exposes herself to a clinical test that monitors nerve impulses while her face is being painted.
The artist has even used threads very prominently in her work highlighting a connection. She says, “It is all about pulling the threads of life together. They keep appearing and disappearing, both spiritually and metaphorically. Even when you do not see them physically in my work, you can still feel their presence.”
Aishwarya has displayed few spontaneous images which she has captured from her room in Paris. These include her studio, frequented streets, architectural structures and metro maps boards.
Her encounter with Paris was not simple. She says, “In the beginning, the issue of language and identity started to come into my work. I thought my work to be quite violent, almost a rebellion, since I was at odds with the environment. In order to break through the barriers of language and identity, I began making sculptures that were fragile.” One of the sculptures, Wooing Paris, documents her efforts to cut across barriers of language, body, and culture.
Aishwarya recollects her time in Paris, “I was in transit from India to there and then back. Being in transit affected my art making. From not knowing to knowing, it’s the entire circle of experience and encounters”. When these experiences and encounters find physical manifestations in the materials used, the resultant work is unique both in self-expression and also in the treatment of the medium. The final form also helps us gain further insight into artist’s experiential memory.
All of the artist’s work pays homage to the city that gave her the space and opportunity to look at an empty slide.