Hair & Nails, Talk & Touch: 4 Encounters with Women Artists in Mumbai
Over the past few weeks, Jennifer Doyle has been reporting from her travels in India. Following is her final dispatch. — Ed.
Masooma Syed makes small things, sometimes from materials gathered off the bodies of her friends, her family — a crown from her mother’s hair, tiny chandeliers from her friends’ fingernail clippings. An astonishing amount of care, attention, and labor is implicit in each of these works. The delicate materials are carefully washed and cleaned; the structures made from fingernail clippings sometimes require that tiny holes be drilled into them (without destroying them); each strand of hair is stiffened, shaped, and placed.
Masooma Syed, "Crown," human hair twined, twisted, and knotted, 9"x8"x variable, 2005
The works require an unusual degree of care and attention from the viewer, who is asked to pay attention to that which we hardly notice. Salima Hashmi places these works within the practice of “contemporary miniature” (Contrary Signs: A New Generation of Artists from Pakistan, Flash Art 265 March-April 09). Partly because I’d been looking at his work recently, as I am talking with Syed about her work, I think of William Pope.L — his work with hair and nails is deliberately dirty, trashy (while also visually engaging, even sort of floral). Tim Hawkinson made a two-inch bird skeleton and spiderweb from fingernails and hair. But that work is made from stuff from his own body (as is the also case with William Pope.L). There’s a narcissism in play in their works: William Pope.L’s is abject; Hawkinson’s is boyish. I would not say this is the case for Syed, quite the opposite. These works are made from the traces of other bodies, as sentimental and spooky keepsakes.
Masooma Syed, "No Man's Land," human fingernails glued together, 2002.
The smallness of Syed’s work seems appropriate to an artist who moves between Lahore and New Delhi. As she does so, she crosses one of the world’s most vexed borders. These works materially respond to structurally unstable situations, in which the storage and transport of works can be an artist’s most pressing material problems. Work made from the bodies of those around you makes sense, as both a sustainable and loving practice.
Political Football
Flash Points contributor and University of Riverside professor Jennifer Doyle is currently spending 2 weeks in India, traveling with the Indian artist Riyas Komu. Following is the third in a series of dispatches from the road. — Ed.
Riyas Komu, "Stadium I," oil on canvas, 2007
Iraq’s victory over Saudi Arabia in the 2007 Asia Cup final is likely to hold up as one the decade’s most significant wins. The team’s victory represented a complex distillation of resistance and anger. The torture and murder of Iraqi athletes is frequently cited in the litany of horrors suffered by the Iraqi people at the hands of Saddam Hussein (see this 2003 Sports Illustrated story). Responding to allegations of torture in the country’s soccer program, in 1997, FIFA investigated the architect of Iraq’s athletics program, Uday Hussein, but spoke only with his people and wrote a report exonerating the sadist. Interest in the plight of the country’s people has long been guided by questions of political expediency. These athletes know intimately what it is to have one’s body enlisted in the service of the state, and are wary at best about having their experiences drafted into discourse defending the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. On winning the cup, while a frantic official stood next to him shouting, “No Politics! No Politics,” captain Younis Mahmoud said, simply: “I want America out of Iraq now!”
Riyas Komu, "A portrait of Younis Mahmoud" from "Occupation Stories I-IV" 2007
Drawn to the team by the Asia Cup victory and the captain’s powerful statement, in 2007, Indian artist Riyas Komu went to watch one of Iraq’s World Cup qualifying matches. At the time, these matches were played in Dubai; this was the period during which the team had been forced into exile (they’ve only recently returned to play in Iraq, with an inaugural match played against another dislocated team, Palestine). Inspired by this experience, Komu made a series of works that elliptically but powerfully tap into the contradictions that swirl around the team, and around the body as an instrument of nationalism more broadly.
Players Painting: Yolanda Sousa Kammermeier
Yolanda Sousa Hammermeier, "Chilavert - The Chiller Thriller," acrylic on canvas, 2002
Chilavert is sitting on my hotel bed. The 6′4″ Paraguyan keeper cuts an imposing figure, even on canvas: his magnificent shaved head, thick neck and muscular shoulders rest on the crisp white linen of the Godwin Hotel in Colaba, Mumbai. He is looking at me as I write this. I can’t read his expression; he’s got a poker face and steely eyes. I’ve had to turn my chair away from him, which is OK because the view from my window is fine (treetops, birds, balcony gardens, and the beautiful decay of Colaba’s mansions). He came to Mumbai with me – I met him in Goa, where he was hanging out in a back hallway in Yolanda Sousa Kammermeier’s gallery. I couldn’t resist taking him home. The man is a goalkeeping legend; he is so identified with the position that his name is commonly used as a nickname for a good keeper. [By "taking him home" I mean Sousa Hammermeier's painting of him - not the man himself. My choice of words here was deliberately confusing.]
Yolanda Sousa Hammermeier, "Umit Davala," acrylic on canvas, 2002
Goan artist Yolanda Sousa Kammermeier practices a very specific form of sport painting. She produces work in direct response to football matches, starting a painting at kickoff, and finishing it at the final whistle. Each painting is a form of match commentary. This is an impressive feat, because football demands a very particular kind of sustained attention. The game is absorbing – Juergen Teller made a work about this, filming himself watching a World Cup match. (The artist confessed that he is repulsed by his anxious contortions and whelps.)
Sousa Kammermeier watches the game differently. Her paintings have a playfulness to them. The painter is, as it happens, a former football player, and a signficant athlete in Indian sports history. Goa, a former Portugese colony, is football-mad. AC Milan and Argentina jerseys are on the backs of half the boys you see driving their scooters around the cows, goats, and pigs who seem to own the roads. The time difference between Goa and the EU means that you can watch Premiership matches from the disco floor, and people do. (I watched Manchester City defeat Chelsea last week, while dancing to Beyoncé with India’s no. 1 goalkeeper and player of the year, Subashish Roy Chowdhary.) Villages all have pitches, and those pitches are in constant use (rested only in the full heat of the day). The region hosts the country’s best club at the moment (Churchill brothers, based in Margao) and India’s national soccer teams (men and women) hold their training camps in the region. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Goa hosted a thriving women’s football scene. Sousa Kammermeier was a star in that world, celebrated for what seems to have been a natural inclination to score hat tricks (three goals in a single match). At her heydey, she was heralded in the press as the “Madonna of Goan Football.” That’s no small title to hold in the intensely Catholic region.
Athletes & Artists: Riyas Komu’s “Mark Him”
Riyas Komu, "Syed Nabi" from the "Mark Him" series, 2007. Courtesy Komu Studio.
Flash Points contributor and University of Riverside professor Jennifer Doyle is currently spending 2 weeks in India, traveling with the Indian artist Riyas Komu. Following is the first in a series of dispatches from Doyle on the road. — Ed.
Since he produced Mark Him (2007), a series of portraits of Indian National Team soccer players, Riyas Komu has been haunted by the sport.
“Mark him” is something one shouts to a defender: it means to track your opponent’s movements, to limit them. To mark is to anticipate where your player wants to go and contain him. An expert defender will study his opponent as he advances and deduce if he wants to take the ball down the outside, or if he dares to cut through the center. He’ll know his opponent’s preferences (which foot is stronger or more accurate) and if his ego can be engaged (if challenged, will he give the ball to a teammate, or will engage the defender directly). Marking yields a kind of intimacy. It can be surprising, too – a smart attacker knows well what you are doing, and can seduce you right our of your boots — taking you on a trip whose itinerary is of his design, not yours.
I came here to India on the force of this imperative: Mark Him. Somehow my interest in Komu’s work demanded not simply that I get to know the artist, but that I get to know the player who haunts him.
We look at the men in Komu’s portraits from the distinct perspective of heroic propaganda. We look up at them; their eyes are directed forward. We are lifted with their gaze according to a monumental logic. Mark Him is reparative, offering a visual attention to a class of athletes who are largely invisible to the cricket-mad Indian mass media. The team is currently ranked 135th by FIFA, and enjoys little glory even as it represents this large and diverse country (players hail from all over India, speak four different languages, and come from distinctly different cultures). Soccer here is a minor sport, edged out of the newspapers by the glitz and glam of cricket and by the television spectacle of England’s top league (the “Premiership”). To even India’s fans, the sport as played here seems slow and boring. The level is just not what it should be.
