SUNAINA BHALLA

We begin with a pair of before-and-after pictures. Incursions, Incisions and Transgressions Liⁱ (2020) is an immediately recognizable image. A greyscale print of an X-ray is, in fact, a mammogram, a globular, protuberant profile of a female breast crowned by a nippular tip. The visual language of radiography is decoded by colour: large swathes of grey in the breast indicate less dense tissue, such as fat, the primary component of the human mammary. Smaller specks and webs of white suggest denser tissue, including glands, connective tissue and tumours, and, here, a concentrated cluster is clearly visible, a pale, blank patch that denotes an area of somatic aberration. Facing it is another alien form, a shape resembling the contour of a bullet suspended in space, closer inspection of which reveals that it is embroidered in red thread, stitched through perforations made in the print. Both are abnormalities. The first, as will soon be apparent, represents the disclosure of a malignant tumour in the body, and the second a material imagining of the cancerous lump, a three-dimensional analogue of the the two-dimensional image. Another work in the same series, Lv (2020), features the same breast, post-lumpectomy; the patch of tumorous calcification is gone, its absence accompanied by an indentation in the surface of the breast, a sign of the collapsed space beneath. As if in inversely proportional relationship to what must have been the sheer trauma of the process, the embroidered intervention here assumes the form of a diminutive red stitch over the breast itself, suggesting perhaps the presence of a suture in actuality – barely noticeable at first glance, a deliberately understated interposition.

Sunaina Bhalla is both an artist interested in textiles and craft, and a survivor of breast cancer. The title of the current exhibition, “Sharps and Such”, is derived from a label commonly found on plastic containers for sharps, a vernacular term for the category of medical tools used to penetrate the epidermal layer. The show conjoins those otherwise distinct dimensions of the artist’s life – her practice and personal medical history – in the motif of the needle, and the trope of violence. In choosing to engage with objects that signify intense physical distress and emotional upheaval for her, she acknowledges the ineluctable reality that confronts most patients with life-threatening conditions: the all too porous line between healing and harm, treatment and torment. The works here, including the Incursions series, foreground surfaces that are embroidered, sewn and stitched, paper and fabric punctured and perforated in the manner of skin pricked and pierced. The disruption of the material integrity of the medium finds correspondence in the record of corporeal incursions visited on the artist, one body symbolically substituted for another, one form of scarring reimagined in a different guise, the experience of trauma confronted in its catharsis. Her deeply intimate objects, then, seem almost to take on the dimension of sympathetic magic, interrupting the empiricism of scientific imaging technology with autographic traces of the artist’s hand, an attempt to exorcise the demons of disease in the encounter between radiograph and needle and thread.

The narrative of the show begins before Bhalla’s diagnosis of cancer, however, and a short biographical note serves to provide the necessary contextual framework here. Trained in textile design at the Polytechnic for Women, New Delhi, she began her career in her native city working with Indian designer Satya Paul, famed for his sarees and use of indigenous patterns. She spent a number of years living in Tokyo in the 1990s and early 2000s, where she picked up traditional Japanese techniques such as nihonga painting, and turned to art full-time; she left Japan for Singapore in 2003, and has been based in Southeast Asia since. The trajectory of her artistic practice, in its early years, was largely premised on paper and canvas paintings, informed by her personal cultural heritage and her embrace of traditional Japanese visual and material culture. Several solo exhibitions during this period, including those in Mumbai, New Delhi and Singapore, involved works that featured extensive use of East and South Asian symbols, as well as the pictorial language of abstraction. Bhalla’s origins as a textile designer were never far behind, though, and a number of paintings also incorporated textile patterns in their compositions. It was in a solo outing with a Mumbai-based gallery in 2012 that she began working with woodblock printing, and an exhibition held in New Delhi the following year saw the emergence of an interest in materiality, manifested in the use of wax in her works. This particular strand of her practice would assume greater significance when, beginning in 2016, she expanded the scope of her practice to include sculptural, sound and mixed media installation. These years were especially trying ones for Bhalla; it was also then that she was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. Within a week of the diagnosis, she underwent a lumpectomy to remove the tumour in her left breast, followed by radiation treatment and, several months later, a hysterectomy, as a preventive measure against the possible onset of other types of cancer. The artist describes the experience in its excruciating reality:

Surgery happened. I was in hospital for 2 days. Then came the waiting for 3 weeks while tests were run to determine the type of treatment I would need … Radiation was recommended along with medication. 19 cycles of radiation over a period of 3 weeks targeted specifically at the area of the tumour – side effects were mild hair loss, extreme fatigue and burning and discolouration of the skin … After 3 months, I had the second surgery to remove the uterus and ovaries to prevent the occurrence of cancer of these organs. I was also willing to be pushed into menopause rather than get tested every 3-6 months. Menopause of course is inevitable for every woman but to have it so suddenly done resulted in a lot of symptoms – insomnia, weight gain, hot and cold sweats, mood swings.ⁱⁱ

About a year into the recovery process, Bhalla decided to enroll in the MFA program at the LASALLE College of the Arts. “I became fatalistic”, she recounts, “and decided I wanted to do everything on my bucket list so I did my MFA … the direction of my practice changed dramatically in terms of materiality, theory and reflection and I started experimenting with wax, medical detritus etc.”ⁱⁱⁱ The seismic shifts in her personal life at this juncture, then, fed directly into the circumstances that enabled a drastic evolution in her work, and nowhere are the originary moments of that cross-fertilization – between autobiography and aesthetic sensibility – more apparent than in the video, Ephemeral (2017). Produced during her stint as a MFA student, the work is comprised of a tableau involving a tower of paraffin wax blocks, surrounded by a phalanx of candles, that slowly but surely, over the brief course of the sequence, begin to melt from the heat, to deliquesce, run, genuflect, crumble and, finally, collapse altogether, a witness to decay and death in real time. As with the Incursions images, what is pictured is mortality metaphorized in material form, the vulnerability of the human body given visual life and poetic license. The artist writes: “After experimenting with fabric and various kinds of pins in semester one [of the MFA program], I explored paraffin wax in its various forms … The tower of wax melts slowly … At one point it reaches the point where the tower falls. It is this point that I want to capture, the point where the wax candle destroys the tower of wax. In a way, I am visualizing the deterioration of the body by the disease as well as the medication for the disease which is, in a way, an artificial chemical which is harmful (poisonous) to the body.”^iv

By her own admission, graduate school enabled Bhalla to push her practice towards a material turn, shifting from a motific visual vocabulary, dominated by the two-dimensional image, to a deeper engagement with materiality and texture – with craft-based techniques and the found object, including medical detritus, as well as installation and sound work. Sharps (2020), for one, consists of nearly two hundred white fabric ropes, suspended from the ceiling in the semblance of a forest of wintry arboreal silhouettes. Belying the impression of serenity, however, is a detail far more ominous; pierced through the lengths of satin-wrapped cotton are thousands of slender, glinting dressmaker’s pins, puncturing the body of the ropes like instruments of torture, or crucifixion. Here, again, is violence manifested in the trope of corporeal incursion and irruption, the pins a stand-in, of course, for the needle and syringe, a confusion of bodily pain and all too necessary medical procedures. While her personal struggle with cancer has defined much of her recent oeuvre, Bhalla’s life has been impacted not just by her own health issues, but also that of her child. For the artist, the repeated perforation of the fabric with pins constitutes a re-enactment of one of the central routines of her life, both pre- and post-cancer: the act of injecting her daughter, who is diabetic, with insulin multiple times over the course of any given day. “I have a daily responsibility that is almost like a ritual”, she remarks, “of dealing with blood tests and injections for my diabetic daughter.” She goes on to note that

The repetitive act of poking is a daily reminder of the fragility of human beings and the damage the body suffers in order to cure certain severe diseases and conditions … The first 2 years were a mental fog for my husband and me as we grappled with the reality of the Type 1 diabetes … Life became a daily ritual of blood tests every two hours … The exhaustion was intense. I could only eat and sleep during the day at the time and that routine dulled my mind … Finally I think in 2013 I went into adrenal fatigue – my body’s ability to fight the stress diminished so I went to the doctor and was put on medication.^v

The lack of mental clarity that she alludes to also recurs as the conceptual premise of Fugue and Incomprehensible Repository (both 2020). The first assumes the form of a piece of fabric almost three metres long, embroidered into the expanse of which is a linear design loosely based on the labyrinth – a pattern that also recalls the language of geometric abstraction – with a dense cluster of the motif at one end slowly unravelling into a more diffuse scheme at the other. Slicing through the length of the tapestry is a single, long, jagged red stitch that resembles a raw scar, intercut at cross angles by suture threads with attached needles. Incomprehensible Repository is a vocal recitation, by the artist, of various medical reports that she received over the years of her cancer treatment, selected for their utilization of opaque medical jargon that often permits little access by the very individual most invested in the information it conveys – the patient. According to Bhalla, she was given a mere 48 hours, when first diagnosed, to decide on the sort of surgery that was desired (whether a mastectomy or lumpectomy), and the long road to recovery, after the surgery itself, riddled by an information that “was mind boggling and totally incomprehensible” in both volume and quality. Fugue, she remarks, “seeks to display that fugue-like state of mind in navigating the labyrinth of information which is always tinged with the fear of making the right decisions and the consequences thereof.”^vi That labyrinth of information is rendered, with Repository, in a stream of sonic data tinctured by the artist’s vocal inflections that suggest underlying emotional tonalities; the work, in fact, begins with an audible sigh, an anticipation of what is to come.

To return to the earlier comparison with sympathetic magic, Bhalla’s works in “Sharps and Such” seem almost fetishistic or ritualistic, in the manner that cultural anthropology would recognize those qualities: objects studded with pins, pictures poked and pierced, materials deliberately reduced to abjection, a panoply of images and things at once intimate and portentous, an attempt to influence the animate world through interventions in the inanimate realm. What J. G. Frazer identified as sympathetic magic was, of course, a form of superstition based on principles of mimesis or contiguity, that “like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.”^vii If, at their core, the objects here are informed by the illegibility between the methods of modern medicine and the concomitant discomfort that they often generate, then perhaps it is possible to understand Bhalla’s imitation and re-enactment of the causes and effects of her own un-well-being as a form of occultism, almost, in the psychological register, an attempt to quell the lingering spectres of emotional and mental aches in revisiting their origins. Tales of pain are frequently recounted with expressions of distress, and here one may locate that grief not in narratives coloured by melodramatic emotion, but in the simple gesture of needle and thread on paper and cloth, the repeated act of pricking with a pin, the verbal recitation of alienated states – the hope for deliverance embodied in the magic of catharsis.

NOTE

Singapore-based artists of Japanese and Indian origins, Sachiyo Sharma and Sunaina Bhalla have come together to create a conceptual installation at the Japanese Cultural Centre inspired by the Japanese concept of Ma. Ma in Japanese culture refers to space interval defined as void. The concept of void, Hsu is also found in Chinese Buddhism, and Shunyata in the Madhyamika school of Indian Buddhism which consider void as the ultimate reality, characterized by tranquillity and undistinguishable dualities. Kshanabhangurata, or evanescence in Sanskrit refers to the ephemeral nature of life forms or a time beat of a metrical cycle, taal in Indian music. They rise and fall like waves in the ocean, existing momentarily in time and space. Both artists have addressed the idea of Ma in their own respective art practices which starts with a minimalistic expression using materials they have either inherited or encountered through life-changing experiences that bring to life their quests through a combined installation.
Here Ma, void or space in-between does not mean absence of space, but an awareness of a transition. This concept of space can be applied in visual and performing arts as well as architecture where exterior and interior of a built space conjoins with transitional terraces, porches, doors and windows wherein the ‘absence’ refers to the ‘presence’ – implying pause, anticipation, and hope. In music and dance – notes, rhythm and movement of a dancer’s body or a musician’s voice and hands or brush strokes applied at intervals in calligraphy – all resonate with Ma. Ma is present in Ikebana, sumi-e as well as Zen rock gardens from which Sachiyo derives inspiration. The practice of living and submitting oneself to the present moment is explored by both artists in their own ways, where birth and death, joy and sadness, pleasure and pain are but different sides of the same coin, complimenting each other.
This thought-provoking homage to Ma explores the impermanence of life, evanescence of life forms, emergence of calmness from trauma of life-threatening conditions using materials like woven linen paper, cocoons, gold and silver threads, cotton cord, bandages, and pins, through intense contemplative processes.
The artists deliberately draw our attention to Ma in their works by focussing on the transitory nature of the very existence of life, by creating an awareness of silence and varied sensations. Created from scratch through an introspective process, these works exude simplicity and spirituality on different planes. The idea of transformation due to the passage of time recurs in the works of both the artists and through that impermanence of beauty, forms in nature, pleasure and pain which wither away and disappear. The artists transform not only their materials, they even play with the forms creating a mindful array of evanescent forms which coexist for a small duration of time to convey a meaning cognised through their respective existences. These experiential woven and block printed works are more to be ‘felt’ than ‘seen’, sometimes ‘entered’. They envision Ma through a sensorial resonance of rhythm at different levels through imprinted patterns and floating cocoons occupying the space of an entire room in a combined installation.
Sachiyo’s association with linen paper goes back to her Japanese calligraphic background and familiarity with paper, brushes and ink. She painstakingly spins the Japanese linen paper yarn with silver thread from Nishijin inspired by traditional Kimono sashes to weave her works into large paper tapestries. She weaves the tapestries with uneven texture and the texture replete with silver shines forth in some spots when it catches light. Sachiyo gives a new twist to traditional weaving with metal thread where asymmetry and irregularity of hand-made creations is the hallmark.
The tapestry works based on flower series titled ‘every life is beautiful – I, II, III’ and a larger work titled ‘Momentary – I & II’ are a reflection of her interpretation of Ma. Her works hold a very powerful message of the transience of life of flowers that are laden with beauty of immense proportion for a few moments after which they disintegrate, wither away, sometimes fossilize. In ‘Momentary’, she further disintegrates the image of a flower into squares and rectangles of different colours and sizes and places them asymmetrically slicing every stage of the bloom drawing our attention to the changing colours and shapes and the effect it has on the beholder. In this silent ‘performance’ of life, often trivialised and generally taken for granted, Sachiyo holds our attention and leads us to meditate on the vast arena of natural forms and phenomena that are perennial, although they change every moment – such as rivers, oceans, mountains, trees, flowers, even human bodies, to an extent.
In ‘Squares’ series, the inclusion of trace colours in small coloured squares and rectangles sprinkled across a vast white textured woven paper tapestry, Sachiyo lends a pause, as if striking a musical note, an ode to Ma. There is a structure in its disorder, even the lose threads linking two salvages vertically or the horizontal piping linking several woven panels in a vast tapestry. The play of light and shade reveals these great momentary transitions in her works which sensitize the viewers to appreciate the process of weaving itself.
Another work of Sachiyo that elaborates on the concept of Ma is her ‘Cocoon’ series. Cocoons symbolise moulting, creation and transformative nature of life forms such as silkworms, moths and butterflies. It also symbolises captivity and freedom and passage of time that the cast away cocoon alludes to. Life’s impermanence and breaking of moults, boundaries and barriers to make meaning and claim freedom are beautifully captured by the hundreds of little cocoons she floats in the gallery space. In drawing our attention to the cocoon, the artist refers to infinity and boundless nature of life on earth, that which is born is bound to die and transform yet the universe remains in existence perennially. Life of forms on earth change, even no two cocoons are of the same colour and when woven together, they form an orb of golden colour, another transformation begins with the intervention of the artist’s imagination. The multiple cocoon installation is a celebration of life and a dynamic exchange of vibrant energy that pulsates simultaneously in all of life’s forms, and when the wind blows them, they pulsate in their own rhythms.
Sunaina weaves steel pins on strips of cloth tied around woven cotton cords alluding to the immeasurable pain and existence affirmed by the pin prick of needles encountered and reaffirmed in the lives of many including the artist herself. Her works evoke a chilling silence one submits to after bearing pain through illness. The agony of bearing pain and transformation the human body undergoes when plagued by a life-threatening disease and living with and caring for someone, has manifested in Sunaina’s works literally as well as metaphorically.
Bandages appear in many forms in her works – wound endlessly around a cotton chord and pierced by pins reminding one of the monotony of stinging jabs and how one submits to pain in a ‘routine’ of tests and their anticipatory results, daily! A synaptic knob shaped installation of multiple pin inserted cords offers a sensorial journey conveyed over two neurons in the human brain. By encouraging one to pass through this installation titled ‘Synapse’, Sunaina explores Ma through the transition of agitation to resilience and silent submission overcoming an inner turmoil while undergoing an illness. In her summation, acceptance is not a sign of weakness but of strength and positivity.
Sunaina integrates the technique of block printing in her works to evoke uniformity, precision, monotony, and sometimes lack of freedom while alluding to the hollowness of existence. An ode to Ma in her works takes a positive spin on the very ‘rhythm’ of monotony in daily care of a loved one, transitioning from illness to wellness.
In another installation ‘The Irregular Metronome’ bandages are imprinted with patterns of arteries and veins and embroidered with red silk thread reminding us of the bloodshot veins of a patient’s eyes. Here the suffering and physicality of a disease transforms into a visually pleasing but disturbing array of red streaks randomly growing on the bandage surface, as if slowly taking control of the body.
Sunaina uses the tally symbol, another leitmotif of her creative concept, alluding to a measure of count, a method to track repetitive action, whether it is of taking a daily dose of medication or undergoing tests to track one’s health . This tally symbol is embroidered as well as block-printed in different permutations and combinations referring to presences and absences and the impermanence of life. In the work titled ‘The Divine Mark’ she transforms a mundane symbol into a reverential motif of sacrosanct nature.
Finally, the imprinted and bandaged forms come together in framed art works titled ‘Rhythm #2’ and ‘Rhythm #3’. One has a central panel of four-part bandaged cords tied together with gold threat in random order, a sort of precious metal inclusion found in many Asian healing practices. In the other work she places seven bandaged cords, some with suture thread and needle intact, referencing the monotony of daily and weekly routine of care and attention that one submits to with valorous calmness. The ‘rhythm’ of life and the ‘routine’ of life pulsate in unison with calmness in these works. The oval egg-shaped imprint covers the canvas surface applied randomly as ‘presences’ and ‘absences’ of life forms that have taken birth or are just about departed. Its subtle golden hue makes them visible and slightly invisible at the same time, underscoring their reference to Ma.
-End-

‘Inspiration is after all the ability to create a world from metaphorical associations, each symbol or sign that points towards some semblance of unity in the mosaic. The poet or artist’s lifework may be compared to someone who dropped a necklace in the dark and must set about retrieving each stone in order to arrive at an achievement of balance, light and colour.’ (Jeremy Reed)

The narratives pose a challenge; since defiance and acceptance are two sides of the coin. What the memories wash up are mythical heroines lauded and ridiculed in turns by generations of storytellers who add their own interpretation to the characters that epics had described as sacred divinities or a flawed spirit, unworthy of respect. In Bhalla’s art the silent and saintly portraits are given a new spirit and soul. They speak up and demand that contemporary history give them another chance to explain their motives and to justify their deeds. Ahalya, deemed flawed, Surpanakha rejected for having dared to love the brave heart Lakshmana, Hidimba, Kaikeyi, Kunti, Amba, Savitri are the mythic protagonists who are similarly transported back into the present from ancient pages of Mahabharata and Ramayana, where they had lain for eons, consigned to a fate they did not deserve. The noble characters are aware of their alienation but instead of protesting choose to remain silent often with tragic consequences. It is as if the world of Indian mythology is reimagined and viewed with eyes that are not clouded with prejudice and narrow-mindedness. The classical tropes are discarded and in their place the artist makes imaginative use of glass, thread, fiberglass and canvas, alongside a minimal colour palate to achieve at lightness that is ephemeral, almost spiritualized.
The epics had fascinated Sunaina Bhalla from early childhood and like other children she had fantasized about the beautiful Apsaras, the larger than life heroes who fought bravely on the battlefield to protect their honour. The niggling doubts and questions came later, when she was growing up. One of the primary characters she drew inspiration from was Ahalya and it was while she was reading her story that the artist started to have serious misgivings about the way women were regarded in the epics.
‘The king of the gods, Indra, was aroused by Ahalya; for when he saw her in the hermitage of her husband Gautama, he desired her. When Gautama returned with the fuel and sacred grass, his wife Ahalya hid Indra in the womb of the house, but just at that moment Gautama took his wife into the house with the intention of making love to her. It was then that he realized with his magic gaze that Indra had already been there in the guise of the Rishi. In a furious rage, he cursed Indra and turned Ahalya into stone.’
It is believed that though Indra had tricked Ahalya by transforming himself into the sage Gautama (her husband), she was aware that it was Indra and therefore she was equally culpable. Ahalya was later labeled a seductress and remained maligned forever. For the artist, it as if the characters spoke to her and she began working on a series she dedicated to the characters of women she felt had not deserved their fate. Each work had a story behind it. Ahalya was the inspiration behind the painted torso, the cold surface without any life or warmth of the woman whose beauty caused her downfall.
The material used for the work in the case of Surpanakha is pins and fiberglass, with the entwined figures of a man and woman appearing like a pattern on the inner surface. The artist asks why did Surpanakha have to face such abject humiliation at the hand of Lakshmana? Was it so wrong to desire a man? Within the complexities of the epics, beyond the tales of valour and war, were hidden stories of great pain and great injustice. In the series she is presenting in the show, Bhalla draws upon the indomitable courage of the characters who dare to declare: ‘Look at me; here I am in my totality. There is nothing to hide or be ashamed of…’
The first work, Avenge, had been created with Draupadi in mind and with her story began a series where Bhalla used diverse mediums like sculptures, paintings, installations and embroidery. Sunaina was clear in her mind that she would not go the figurative route to build her narrative but work instead with abstract forms to tell her story.
Trying to connect the titles with the work was like working on a jigsaw puzzle and in the end, I just asked her to explain. Over long conversations I gradually understood why a work was (intriguingly) called Gandhari’s Womb and the significance of it’s 101 parts that fit seamlessly together to complete the installation. She explained to me the reason why there were 101 parts because apart from the 100 Kaurava sons, Gandhari had also given birth to a daughter Duhsala.
‘The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary can speak.’ The words of Hans Hofmann seem especially relevant in the case of Bhalla’s work. Like a leit motif, the grandiloquent story of the epic is the source the artist returns to time and again, but the language is abstract and the veiled references remain hidden.
Over the last many years, Sunaina Bhalla has pared down her palette of colours to red, white and black. Each offers versatility and a range of possibilities whether she is painting, sculpting or embroidering. She had enjoyed working with diverse colours when her art practice first begun but the deeper the involvement went the surer she was that her artistic expression required the colours red, black and white. The appeal lay in their sweet meditative quality, perhaps in the versatility of their nature that corresponded to different moods of the artist. She had been deeply influenced by the Japanese culture and way of life in her 7 yearlong stay in Tokyo. She visited the many Buddhist monasteries and temples, spending hours just observing people, their rituals and ways. Wanting to learn more about their art she took classes in traditional Japanese pottery, then studied Rice Paste printing before picking up Nihonga painting. She did not know the language but devoted herself to acquiring the skills by observing her teachers. Their aesthetic sensibilities were so minimalistic and stark, she recollects. The influences guided her art practice and she used some of the techniques in the body of work she was now creating in her own studio-space. However, the narrative she yearned to tell was based on the 16 women she had known intimately from her reading of the epics. The sculpture, paintings, embroidered art works therefore are woven from pan Indic mythology but the style and technique (of her work) is influenced by her studies in Japan. In the instance of Ahalya, the silhouette of an exquisitely proportioned woman has stylized images of a man and woman entwined on its surface reiterating the story of the seduction. In the melding of her readings, travels and studies a body of art has emerged that is luminous and incandescent, her anger and grief at the injustice meted out to women is deftly scripted in. The brutality and violence perpetrated lies hidden in the layers of her art, her angst a part of the subtext.
In the blackest of blacks, sensuous reds and pristine white Bhalla’s narrative tells us of the women who dared to explore their sexual needs and were not apologetic for their ‘transgressions’. The wounds are ancient and the assaults history but there is no end to the suffering, the cycle just repeats itself and the viciousness of the backlash gets worse.
The delicacy and lightness of touch in the embroidered work are subtly blended to resemble historical design tradition. The decorative motifs are elaborately brought together; the imaginary figures and ephemeral forms reflecting a timeless continuity. The images are a series of mirrors; the reflections are stories of pain and loss. The frames of the mirrors are painted in ornamental gold to resemble the ornate frames of antique hand mirrors, while inside, the artist uses woolen thread to create abstract patterns in red, white and black. Keikeyi, Hidimba or Amba and Kunti have their soliloquies to share, their own memories of what transpired. The mirrors poetically reflect heartbreak, rejection, and the actual interiority of pain. The tangle of thread, beads, glistening surfaces create a delicate nostalgia and it is as if the viewers too can see their own fears and loss in the depths of the gilded mirrors.
In the intricately layered works, the artist re-examines the mythological stories and places them in another context. What if they were judged differently, she asks. It is time to let the necessary speak.

‘What have the heavenly powers to say of this?
They take afternoon walks, they notice.
Here are we, and over there the so-called kingdom of Nature.
What’s worse, consciousness or lack of consciousness/
Well, there weren’t any mirrors in Eden.’ (Czeslaw Milosz).

Ina Puri
Art Historian and curator
2017

Sunaina Bhalla is based in Singapore and I think it’s time we started looking at works of artists of Indian origin living in different places. Its fascinating to see how these artists create pictorial languages of their own, using their experiences and the geography of where they’re placed to explore questions of culture and identity. In this body of work Sunaina does a retelling of Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda using mediums and expressions of Indian and Japanese painting interspersed with elements of textile art in which she is primarily trained. The cross cultural dialogue in her work is intriguing.

He smears the dome of her swelling breasts with shining deer musk He makes star clusters with pearls and a moonmark with his nail. In woods behind a sandbank on the Jumna river
Mura’s foe makes love in triumph now

Gita Govinda, Tender Krishna, 7th part -14th song

Sunaina returns to her traditional Indian roots by attempting to explore the traditional Indian iconic text, the Gita Govinda authored by the Odisha poet Jayadeva 12 CE. Not fully conversant with the language Sanskrit Sunaina decided to use Barabara Stoller Miller’s translation of the text as her guiding force and she is equally at home with Dr Kapila Vatsyayan ‘s interpretation of the Mewari Gita Govinda. Part of Riti Kaleen poetry , the Gita Govinda explores the entire range of the sensuality of traditional Indian kavya poetry . And as expected Sunaina would lean on the two traditional representational genres of both Indian and Japanese traditional paintings which she trained in.

The miniature tradition of Indian art, and the Japanese Nihonga tradition, both known for their application of flat colours like white, grey, green, golden, silver and black also form Sunaina’s favoured colour palette. The technique of the Nihonga, when brought together with the Indian tradition of miniature paintings, completely changes the scale. Sunaina judiciously combines the two techniques and takes the artwork onto a large format thus bringing in a novel interpretation of the traditional love play of Radha and Krishna as the nayak/nayika bheda in the act of the aesthetic experience of ananada or sublime bliss, the natural fruition of the Advaita philosophy.

– Dr. Alka Pande