Artist Nilima Sheikh’s Terrain uses the oriental tradition of screens to unravel a deeper narrative of the human condition. By Uma Nair
To glimpse Nilima Sheikh’s Terrain at Bikaner House (presented by Gallery Espace) is to be invited into an engagement with the pain, pathos and the struggling voices of humanity.
Terrain consists of eight panels that are seven feet high and a little less than three feet wide. They are painted on paper pasted on cloth. Six panels have painted images, while two include texts, mostly poetry, written on painted surfaces. The poetry quotations are wide-ranging, including the works of the medieval Kashmiri mystic poet lal Ded, Agha Shahid Ali of Kashmir, as well as Punjabi and Gujarati folk songs. Much of it has a note of yearning melancholy. Inscribed in these panels are stories from folklore to present times that lend to each other new and cumulative language, and contexts.This work was shown last year at Documenta 14 in Kassel.
Curator Gayatri Sinha says, “For her participation at Documenta in Kassel 2017, Sheikh creates a new format of viewing, an elliptical wooden screen form with eight painted scrolls on each side creating an unusual structure, one that unites both distance and intimate viewing, engaging some of Nilima’s primary sources of inspiration: the Chinese hand and vertical scroll, the Japanese painted screen, as well as the Persian/Indian muraqqa or painted miniature manuscript.”
Sheikh has inspired several generations over her five-decade career as a Baroda-based painter and deeply revered mentor. During the last two decades, she has often been working on subjects that relate to the northern region of the Indian sub-continent, with particular emphasis on Kashmir. Sheikh often visited Kashmir during her childhood and her intense internal turmoil after the 2002 Gujarat riots engaged her ability to address her connection with Kashmir’s anguish through her art. This has accumulated in a body of work that has created a visual language to bring together different aspects of the region, and its histories, in an attempt to understand some of the complexities therein.
In the current work, Sheikh speaks about the abandoned girl-child, finding love outside her community or a woman crossing a mountain river supported by an earthenware pot to meet her lover every night as in Sohni Mahiwal. These songs of doomed resistance are still sung across Punjab, both in India and Pakistan. Coming to more contemporary times, the young student Rohit Vemula battling the life-long hatred that birth in a low caste Dalit family brought him, ends his life as a final political act. Sheikh also includes song and poetry as a performative mode of public address, echoing the 14th-century female mystic lal Ded of Kashmir (translated by Ranjit Hoskote), along with references to texts from several writers who have written about Kashmir such as Aga Shahid Ali and Salman Rushdie.
Sinha in her note presents deeper studies of aesthetics and art history to us. “Presented in this composite form, the work invites comparison with the Chinese and Japanese painted scroll, both sources of intimate study for Sheikh. The form may derive from the Japanese sliding door (fusuma) and folding screen (byobu) of the Japanese Yamato-e era, or indeed the Nagasaki school of the 19th century, richly contaminated with Chinese and European influences, that were so much a part of its effulgent creativity. By separating the scroll from its function — as a screen, or a partition, Sheikh lends it an extraordinary density and narrative depth. In effect, we then have the scroll deploying the traditions of Asian painting in a tantalising amalgam.”
Evanescent figures float across her terrain, sometimes dwarfed by the enormity of nature, and circumstance, like Sohni swimming in the deep waters of the Indus.These are narratives of love and longing, amidst deep sadness. Mahmud Darwish speaks of the “present absent” status of Palestinians, a term used by the Israeli state. Sheikh uses this allusion of absence and presence and the tenuous liminal space between the two to pack in the most profound emotion, around freedom and captivity, beauty and violence, love and deep betrayal. A delight for art lovers and students who must understand the language of art woven into the realms of literature.
(Terrain: Carrying across, leaving behind, is on at Bikaner House, till July 29, 2018 )