Mortality is a surprisingly underrepresented theme in Indian modern and contemporary art. While specific areas of this vast subject have been scrutinized — victims of political violence are commonly foregrounded by emerging artists; the experience of ageing has been movingly explored by the likes of Bhupen Khakhar, Arpita Singh and Sudhir Patwardhan; and the body’s vulnerability often features in Gieve Patel’s paintings — no artist has focused as consistently as Yardena Kurulkar on transience, corporal fragility, and the inevitability of death.
Yardena’s art is rooted in powerful emotions of fear and anxiety, and is profoundly intimate in its employment of her own anatomy, but she exercises meticulous formal distancing to achieve a balance between personal and universal, visceral and conceptual, transporting viewers to a place of contemplative stillness removed from the here and now. Her latest series of works, grouped together in the exhibition The Body in Agreement, persevere with her longstanding practice of probing, scanning, measuring and replicating her body and its constituent organs. What has changed and evolved is the perspective brought to bear on her abiding preoccupations. As the title of the show suggests, she has arrived at a place of reconciliation, of coming to terms with the end that cannot be escaped.
The process of conceptualizing the exhibition played out during the Covid pandemic, a time when all individuals confronted their own mortality and that of close family members even as nations fumbled for an adequate response to the global catastrophe. In those nerve-wracking months, Yardena found herself comprehending a continuity between the material body and the world around it, accepting the eventual merging of the self with nature.
Consequent to this shift in mindset, she created a series of prints based on impressions left on zinc plates by leaves, twigs, and weeds gathered from the Baghdadi Jewish cemetery in Chinchpokli a remnant of Bombay’s most cosmopolitan decades. The impressions were traced in successive layers, after which she etched marks on the plates by moving hand and needle in accordance with a prerecorded set of oral directions. The dense lyricism of the resulting compositions might seem at odds with their origins in a graveyard, but is peculiarly appropriate considering that central Bombay’s old burial grounds are tranquil places filled with shade trees and birdsong in the midst of a noisy, chaotic, metropolis. The city is all hustle while beyond the high walls of the cemeteries lie leafy stretches offering restfulness and a broader sense of time and history.
In contrast to the mood of the Body in Agreement prints, a series of paintings titled The repose of the night does not belong to us considers the disquiet that is a feature of hyperactive urban life and pharmacological treatments availed of to ameliorate its symptoms. Pouring pigments onto paper, Yardena allowed the predominantly deep tints to find their own paths and form unpredicted patterns, using industrial colours manufactured for pharmaceutical capsules and tablets. The paintings, studded with black spots that resemble lesions on a medical scan, are overlaid with a printed tessellated mesh of the artist’s brain created by running cross-sectional images of the organ through specialized software. While some of the compositions are brooding abstracts, others evoke insomnia and uneasy slumber through outlines of torsos tossing and turning.
The artist commonly incorporates into her work recent innovations like Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Selective Laser Sintering and 3-D printing, but is at equally at home with the most venerable practices involving fired and unfired clay. An instance of the deployment of newer technologies is Breath of Sorrow, a simulacrum of her lungs made with powdered thermoplastic shaped into segments joined together by rivets. She brings her training as a ceramist to bear on An All Consuming Grief, a dark cast of her arm and hand tightly bound in a kind of bandage, shrunken in the process of firing so it appears to be the limb of a child or young adolescent. The cloud of cotton at its torn-off end introduces an unmistakable echo of political violence and war alongside the persistent theme of illness and a concomitant wish for healing.
Lost in Spaces Between the Light also conjures histories of brutality, but the immediacy of An All Consuming Grief is here replaced by an appreciation of the longue durée. A chair is embedded with replicas of the artist’s spine, hands and feet, with red rubber tubes spilling from it onto the floor like the outcome of an evisceration. The seat appears to be a wheelchair but its ornateness also brings to mind a throne, making it an emblem of both power and powerlessness. Piled on it are shapes that resemble helmets, perhaps trophies of conquest. The sculpture is replete with symbolic objects and yet, unlike most symbolic art which hardens into one-dimensionality, it retains ambiguousness and multivalency.
While the body is palpably at the centre of most of The Body In Agreement, a work titled There’s Something Not Quite Right in the Air implies the corporal self entirely through absence. Surgical sutures normally employed to hold wounded flesh together are tied together in a delicate network, reversing the process where stitches dissolve as the body heals by suggesting a dematerialised body that has left behind knotted threads connecting nothing with nothing. A magisterial evocation of ephemerality and fragility, There’s Something Not Quite Right in the Air brings to mind Prospero’s monologue from The Tempest:
… like the baseless fabric of this vision –
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Dissolution into insubstantiality is at the core of Kenosis and Mostly empty space, the former a set of 15 digital prints and the latter a video with a running time of a little over 13 minutes. Like a significant proportion of Yardena’s oeuvre, both utilise the form of repetition to probe the theme of temporality. Kenosis consists of a terracotta replica of the artist’s heart placed in a basin of water and photographed as it gradual disintegrates. Previous iterations of the same idea having captured the decomposition of Yardena’s face and of her entire body, the picturing of this most crucial of organs underlines the centrality of time-as-decay in her artistic philosophy.
Kenosis, made in 2015, is the earliest work in the show and Mostly empty space, the last one completed, connects with it thematically while revealing a changed viewpoint. The video was shot near Alibag on the Konkan coast, in the vicinity of the location where the founding members of her Bene Israel community are said to have been shipwrecked some two thousand years ago. We see Yardena placing twelve clay pots into a pond one by one, each receptacle having been shaped by a single sharp breath. Although she is not personally religious, her process of creating the pots brings to mind a passage from Genesis: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”. The clay vessels are symbolic bodies that she consigns to water, and to inevitable dissolution, with a subtle gesture that is both benediction and valediction, acknowledging what has gone by while accepting what is to come.