Namrata Arjun’s practice blurs the boundary between performance and painting. She is inspired by feminist art practices of Joan Semmel and Luchita Hurtado, where her paintings engage the viewer as a participant. 

In Possessed (2020), the interior scenes are drawn from photographic sources of the Sudanese Zar ritual, which is framed as an idiom of feminist resistance. Protesting bodies crowd outside the window, with little regard for the overdetermined structure of perspectival space, or the figure/ground dichotomy. The equally disobedient geometric, mosaic flooring further fractures this dichotomy, opening up multiple spaces within the picture plane. The expressively handled figures, icons, and bodies exist on the threshold between gesture and illusionism, past and present, across time and culture. The wetness, liquidity, and the viscous quality of paint, is an equally important vehicle for evoking the feminine and the fluid as a counterpoint to the dry, abstract or dematerialised laws and systems that territorialize bodies. 

Some of these concerns are taken forward and elaborated in the series Playing God (2020). These paintings assert presence by merging the viewer’s vantage point with the artist’s. The personal viewpoint is used as a formal device to embody an emerging consciousness that is critical of nostalgia and euphoric recall. The viewing figure is painted performing various mudras or hand gestures, representing the Gods as in classical Indian dance traditions, and holding photographs. The photographs, though painted, do not have the haloed quality of a miniature painting, or an oleograph. The paintings seek to prise open and examine memory and myth, and position them as performative actions or verbs. 

Namrata Arjun (b. 1995) lives and works in Chennai, India and is an MFA candidate at Bard College, New York. She was a Young India Fellow at Ashoka University (2016-17), worked with the collection and programming at the Devi Art Foundation (2017-19), and is currently a Research Associate at the Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore. She was awarded a residential scholarship at Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Arts & Research (December 2019 - March 2020) by the Viennese art factory baseCollective (Böhler/Granzer), for artistic research and arts-based-philosophy, mentored by Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie Granzer, culminating in an installation and field performance in March 2020.