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….