Tuesday 11 February 2014

T Rathidevi Panicker



T.Rathidevi Panicker
MASK/UN-MASK[Password] 2013
Acrylic on canvas and archive prints
size 6x5feet

The veiled face,that my Password series had as its leitmotif, came to me through its alarmingly frequent presence in mass media -especially 24 x 7 ‘breaking news stories’ about sex rackets and human trafficking of various dimensions,moral policing and various forms of living terror.The mask-like veil is one of those contradictory culminations of precisely the very same ‘progressive’ processes of social reform that ushered in modernity , whose agenda also strangely deemed necessary the increasing concealment of the Body,especially the Female Body. The history of social reform of my own home state Kerala, is itself a much debated complex text and a testimony to this.

… As I looked at these old sepia photographs ,these women look back at me unveiled,unabashed and without a trace of coyness.

I have juxtaposed a collage of their images on either side of the masked/veined figure without nostalgia , as a source of hope ,a reminder of the possibility of another order ,another way of being that existed even as recently as the life time of my own maternal grandmother….

No comments:

Post a Comment