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Shalina Vichitra

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What are maps, but elaborate regurgitations of the world as cartographers flamboyantly imagine it to be? In the seventeenth century, Holland's roads and towns were accommodated in the body of a rippling, muscular lion, suggesting strength and freedom. Earlier, in the 12th century, the world was presented as a circle, with Jerusalem at its centre. Neither map could have been used to navigate one's way around, but they hold within them the codes...
Read More What are maps, but elaborate regurgitations of the world as cartographers flamboyantly imagine it to be? In the seventeenth century, Holland's roads and towns were accommodated in the body of a rippling, muscular lion, suggesting strength and freedom. Earlier, in the 12th century, the world was presented as a circle, with Jerusalem at its centre. Neither map could have been used to navigate one's way around, but they hold within them the codes to constructing the world from a given point of view. Shalina Vichitra's works are similar cartographic journeys.

In her of paintings, Shalina follows a specific train of cartography, the kind found in ancient Rome, where all roads lead to and from an assertive centre point. But Shalina's work neither guides nor prescribes: her viewers are required to find their own way around her work, knowing of course, that all routes will lead them to the artist, creator of they paths they steer along.

By basing her painting on such notions of maps, Shalina gently critiques the general public perception of the artist, under pressure to be literal and almost illustrative, dismissing the tyranny of expectation and the general understanding of art as a pretty visual that must immediately be recognized. In fact, her work, as this exhibition shows, sets out to challenge this on many counts as she forces her viewers to navigate their own way around her work.

Like the Constant Gardener in John Carre's novel of the same name, Shalina ploughs away, digging and seeking something she can scarcely define herself. In several works, she lavishly uses muted silver, gold, and bronze: all metals and an alloy mined from the gnawed plant. Through these seemingly random (but carefully planned) sheaths of metal, she holds up the geoid earth, turning it inside out, exposing its rawness before ever reconstructing it all back. It's a metaphor for the act of art making itself: the exploration, the process fraught with exhilaration and trepidation. Shalina realizes the vulnerability of this, an uncomfortable feeling that pushes her to deftly use the metals to serve simultaneously as hot, flowing magma and a soothing, protective patina.

If, historically, maps everywhere share the common idea of a land, a tangible, geographical place that they describe, then Shalina's works emerge from an in-between zone, those connecting her trips to Ladakh and return to Delhi. Her earlier paintings found her with strong visual elements from the former. These still remain robust, but she has expanded, deriving now from mud based, horizontal architecture and vivid colours from rare paintings in monasteries perched on mountain-tops. Strips of colour, a new element that are derived from the rich colours of monastery paintings, work here as bar codes, containing dense information about the experience of travel and discovery.

Each year, Shalina spends long weeks trekking in Ladakh; now she almost knows the contours by heart; Revisiting it offers her a reference to her own maps in the mind, an allusion to the idea of discovery and problem solving, something like the process of art making. Shalina refers to Ladakh, with its rarefied altitude, brown and blue flatness and sheer expanse of unpopulated land, as a terrain which forces her to look at her own inner detailing with new eyes. In this solitude, she begins to calibrate herself, asking if it is valid to map her presence at all vis-à-vis the world.

Shalina has studied art in Delhi, the big urban metropolis she still lives in, and which is uncharacteristically reflected in her work. At one level, she draws out imaginary plans for the city. Her spatial arrangements include grids, networks and zones, working something like an urban planner and firmly entrenching herself in the urban sprawl in the process. Yet, at another level, she hints at the physical surfaces, marked by the vertical construction and the dense crowdedness of spaces in tiny grids and dizzily crowded points.

Her painting arises from the difference between this buzz and the Ladakhi solitude.

As a result, Shalina paints imagined borders and countries, inter-mingling with tangible ones. Unsupported by seas, lakes, mountains and neighbouring nations, even such countries that Shalina has copied off the map appear to be random clumps of land mass. Like the processes where she engages in unpeeling the Earth and letting the magma harden on the surface, Shalina now reconstructs the patches of land on the surface into imagined entities not within any geo-political net. One can almost hear John Lennon in this fantastical world : Imagine there's no country, it's easy if you try.

Shalina works in many avatars. First she is like a surveyor, the unrecognized plodder who measures and estimates, the one who knows the feel of the cushiony sands and the marshy flatland that will finally be pressed into the margins of a map. Here, she looks at the terrain, marks it and creates routes where she thinks they exist. Then, Shalina dons the mantle of the draftsman, whose skills are apparent in a single glance. Now, she masks and unmasks surfaces to create imaginary lands and the boundaries in between them. These are reworked frequently, as she applies multiple layers, altering the physical attributes of these formations from layer to layer. This is repeated till a clear route for the painting is charted out. Older spaces are filled up, reclaimed as they are retraced by layering through sheaths of colour and coats of paper. Sometimes, transfer paper offers a glance at what lies beneath. Her use of flat, matt silver, something relatively recent, finds a metaphorical resonance with the metal's gelatinous presence in X-Rays: both enable the hidden innards to come alive on the surface. In this case, isn't it Shalina's own sense of self?

If her earlier works were ablaze with wonderment, these new ones point to a phase where she is beginning to come to grips with the impossibility of pinning oneself down to one spot. Instead, she's beginning to accept the possibility, albeit hesitatingly, of including herself as a subject of sorts of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Her decision to construct a model of a 6 foot by 6 foot mandala, Blessed, reflects her sense of hesitation, confusion and recognition of this uncertainty. Blessed allows the viewer to interact with it only transiently. Here, on the ceiling, it can be seen by those who crane their necks as it hangs steadfastly above them. A step on, and you're away. Given Shalina's own deep, spiritual link with the land, its soil, formations, textures, Blessed invokes a sense of wonder and humility about the Earth.

This exercise is what makes the body of work what it is: a mix of the controlled and the unfettered, creating tensions and releasing them, inhaling and exhaling. The everyday process of living itself.

By Bharati Chaturvedi

Honours and Awards

1997 Award, MFA Prg.1st Year, College of Art, New Delhi

1996 Award, Sahitya Kala Parishad, New Delhi

1996 Award, Swapan Biswas Award, College of Art, New Delhi

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PAST StoryLTD AUCTIONS

Showing 1 of 1 works

Lot 58 Details

Absolute Auction of Modern & Contemporary Indian Art 20-21 August 2014

Shalina Vichitra

Untitled

Acrylic and charcoal on canvas

12 x 34.5 in

Winning bid
$612
Rs 36,090
(Inclusive of buyer's premium)

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