(En)gendering Transgressions
In the multimedia installation “…and when she roared the universe quaked”, Shakuntala Kulkarni examines gendered, female, creative/creating bodies as a site of both “otherness” and empowerment. By adopting a vocabulary of defamiliarised bodies, eerie juxtapositions and sculptural signifiers, she playfully confronts, angrily shatters or slyly subverts the limitations of epic, “timeless” narratives and their cultural representations, particularly with regard to the embodied identities of women. Her representational strategies ensure that an intimacy as well as a confrontation is constructed between the artist and viewer, as we are invited into various visual and aural frames. Kulkarni’s paintings and videos are deliberately multiple, partial, ambiguous, and therefore not total and totalising. Thus, a particular coherence emerges paradoxically in the whole multimedia installation through visual and aural multiplication and fragmentation (Morra, 2007).
In paintings like “Unsung epics I”, “Unsung epics IX” and “The role I would love to play, Messiah II”, Kulkarni uses repetition and a palimpsestic structure to great effect in representing the complexity of gendered subject formation, history and memory. For instance, the visual within a visual of the protagonist ripping open her chest to reveal the warrior within in “The role I would love to play, Messiah II” hints, not just at an originary, confessional wound, but also at the sense of a viewer’s partial knowledge. Though the figure moves and rips her chest open, the full-frontal camera angle frames the image like a painting. The image is static, and yet there is movement within it. Visually, the film makes apparent the intimacy of a partial revelation, a tension and release, as a mode within a mode. The dissonance inflects within it the fact that we are witnessing something epic and yet intimate; a language within another language; the subject’s relationship to what Spivak calls the translative “space of the other within the self” (1993).
It offers Kulkarni a means of representing the complex and overdetermined intertwining of the personal, social and cultural, as well as the gendered, spatial and bodily intersections of these relationships across and between media. Thus Kulkarni’s work moves fluidly between “authenticity” and dreams, between split selves and fragmented subjectivities, between the individual and the archetypal, between playfulness and polemic (Palekar, 2005). The work interrogates what kinds of representations make it possible for the voices and bodies of “Indian women” to not be completely anchored to spaces dictated by predominantly patriarchal, epic tropes. And yet this exploration of patriarchy is never simplistic or couched in reductionist “men vs. women” terms. For example in the video “Is it just a game? I” we see a woman in the group that is tormenting the blindfolded woman; thus the video explicitly contends that women not only enact forms of gendered violence, but can be enthusiastic enforcers of patriarchal morality as inscribed on female bodies. Through such a self-aware staging of a politics of the “everyday”, Kulkarni problematises normative consolidations of gender, sex, power and violence.
Kulkarni knowingly en-genders moments of discomfort, friction, complicity and confrontation for male and female viewers. She is preoccupied with ontological issues and an interrogation of gender and its conventionally associated qualities/ behaviours/ bodies throughout the works. Thus in the glass paintings in the ceiling installation “and when she roared the universe quaked”, and “Unsung epics V” the viewer is enveloped by a multiplicity of femaleness— wounded, comic, carnivalesque, flesh spilling over the containment of skin— but also strong, hard, severe, warrior-like. Within these images, the play on temporality and repetition calls into question the fixity of (female) identity, and interrogates the ordering of “difference” and “sameness”. So it can be seen that Kulkarni questions gendered/ sexed bodies themselves as always already “known”, “mapped” and “narrated”. What we have, instead, is a notion of hybrid ontology as regenerative, insofar as it transgresses the borders of taxonomic logic (Sullivan, 2004), remapping our social and bodily reality by articulating the shifting relations between bodies of flesh, bodies of knowledge, and socio-cultural bodies.
The work as a whole is experienced as a layered and sometimes deliberately ambiguous encounter staged between artist and viewer; between various languages of articulation, performative gestures and bodies; between the personal and mythical; between time, space and place. For example, the multi-layered referentiality of “Unsung epics III”, results in “a doubling of activity, of knowledge, of viewing, of relating” (Morra, 2007). What Kulkarni’s visual practices, politics and aesthetic self-reflexivity offer us, in addition, is an embodied materialisation of both, gender and gendered practices, and challenges to these. She creates art that reminds us of the paradoxes of the body— where we experience the confines of physical/spatial embodiment, and gendered violence, and the potential for radical transgression (“Unsung epics II” and “Unsung epics VIII” are particularly powerful examples). The artist’s body, and the body of work itself, “… can be composed, recomposed and decomposed by other bodies” (Gatens, 1996); so the viewer’s body also becomes a creative and productive body, constituted through its constant interactions with other bodies.
It is interesting that some contemporary feminist/ embodiment scholars (Stryker, 1994; Sullivan, 2004; Palekar, 2005) are re-thinking phenomenology, re-looking at human agency, bodily investments, and theorising performative and interactive practices as crucial premises for the constitution of subjects. Kulkarni’s glass paintings in the ceiling installation can be seen as a particularly striking response to/ intervention in these debates. Each viewer is invited to see the glass paintings on the ceiling through a handheld mirror. The viewer can also watch reflections of other viewers seeing the ceiling through their mirrors. These mirrors work, not only to productively complicate the act of seeing itself; they emphasise the way in which embodied subjects are produced through a “regime of visibility” (Tuer, 1997), that itself turns the world into flesh. In other words, the viewer sees through the mirror; one subject sees another, and the subject, in seeing and desiring to see, is also seen and so made flesh (Tuer, 1997). The fabrics, glass, mirrors and video screens in Kulkarni’s works are no longer simply the places of reception, but themselves become a form of embodiment.
Jean-Luc Nancy explores the possible relationship between bodily-being, self and other, in terms of “tact”— of a sensuous and exorbitant exposure that touches, cuts, marks, traces, engraves, squeezes, scratches, strikes, weighs, palpitates and thinks (1993). In creating this breathtakingly “tactful” work, and in opposition to the foreclosure of heterogeneity (which constitutes both a forgetting and an act of violence), Kulkarni posits the possibility of viewing/ creating art as an encounter “in its own right, separate, particular” (Winterson, 1996); a form of reading/ seeing/ creating that would allow the work to “speak in its own voice, not in a ventriloquism of yours” (Winterson, 1996). Thus Kulkarni’s work not only enables, but performs contingent, friction-generating articulations, and in doing so, critically re-engages with old, yet crucial and very relevant debates.
In the end, an ultimate horizon of understanding; an overarching political and representational strategy materialises in the work. I suggest that Kulkarni explicitly acknowledges the ethical directions any explorations of gender, embodiment, power/ powerlessness and representation must take. Thus the work does not just set out to actively re-member/ re-gender the epic or heroic, but also powerfully gestures to an ethics of seeing or listening.
Shalmalee Palekar
Sydney,2007
Dr Shalmalee Palekar is a lecturer in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Her research areas are Postcolonial literary and cultural theories and practices; theories of subjectivity and textuality; representations of gender and sexuality, and queer/ postcolonial formations. For a list of selected publications, please go to: http://empa.arts.unsw.edu.au/staff/. Shalmalee is also a translator of Marathi poetry into English, and writes, acts, and performs professionally with three women and a cello, collectively called “Funkier Than Alice”.
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