Nasreen Mohamedi
Talwar Gallery
108 East 16th St.
New York, NY 10003
September. 18 to December 20, 2003
By DEBORAH
GARWOOD
Nasreen Mohamedi
Untitled XVIII c1981
black and white photograph, 23 cm x 29 cm;
Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York
The photographs of Nasreen
Mohamedi are a recent supplement to the drawings of this underknown
Indian artist/ photographer/ writer. Fascinating in and of themselves,
these 25 silver gelatin prints are being exhibited for the first time
at Talwar Gallery. Some of Mohamedi's photos were concurrently on view
in "The Last Picture Show," an exhibition of conceptual photography
curated by Douglas Fogle for the Walker Art Center. Fogle became aware
of Mohamedi's photographs through Talwar Gallery's director, who represents
the artist's estate.
Mohamedi was born in 1937
in a province of India which is now part of Pakistan. Trained in India,
England, and France, where she came under the influence of the writer
Helene Cixous, she was also a devotee of Zen. Mohamedi made drawings
and took photographs as she traveled through Eastern and European cultures
during the 1960s - 1980s. From the age of 22 until the end of her life,
her poem-like diary entries reflect on the world while she moves within
it as observer, artist, and participant. An example from 1988 reads:
Curve
Curve slowly coming to O.
Silence oasis in acoustic parks.
Nasreen Mohamedi
Untitled VII
c1970
black and white photograph, 22 cm x 37 cm
The vast scale of her images,
materialized in silver gelatin prints no bigger than 11" x 14",
belies the intimately subjective view through the camera that she maintains
over her lifetime. Paradox
is at the heart of her images. They describe a sublime and indeterminate
realm on the periphery of iconic representation. A zeppelin shaped ellipse
of light lifts off from the horizon below; tiny lights on the slim ground
plane are all that anchor it. The linear qualities of closeup taut threads
on a loom curiously, cottony, resemble orthogonal lines of perspective
converging on an infinite point. Traffic lines painted on the street
in Japan, together with characters for stop or slow, are depicted from
the angle at which their distortion is most elongated. Terrace planting
seen from a great distance and sand patterns also read as ambiguous
in scale. The mobile, camera-assisted observer constructs outposts and
touchstones by directing the photographic gaze toward an interiorized
vision wherever she goes. As we befriend her vision, the world is both
larger and smaller than we normally experience it.
The last prints in the exhibition
correspond to the final years of Mohamedi's life. They are extremely
reductive and simply composed. Mohamedi photographed arched doorways
from deep inside an architectural space. In these prints, the jet black,
soft-edged shape of an arched doorway rests alone on a white expanse
of paper. The extreme ends of the photographic process were the focus
of her final experiments.
Does Mohamedi's photographic
work belong to conceptual photography, is it a lost body of work recovered?
Fogle's curatorial expertise says it is. So does Indian curator and
writer Geeta Kapur, who places Mohamedi in the avant garde of Indian
art in her recent book When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural
Practice in India. (New Delhi, 2000). Opposing Kapur's postmodern approach,
Tapati Guha-Thakurta argues for a more traditionally modernist contemporary
art history of Indian art rich in a different political and aesthetic
critique. More will be written about Nasreen Mohamedi in the near future.
Meanwhile, her work and writing are an emerging treasure in the west.
