The exhibition attempts to highlight both
Gowda’s poetic and her political practices, grounded on a thoughtful and perceptive view of the world, accompanied by an awareness of the symbolic and communicative value of matter, objects and their remains.
Born in Bhadravati (India) in 1957, Sheela Gowda has developed her practice through a constant dialog and exchange between local artistic traditions and international forms of art.
Though trained as a painter, at the Ken School of Art, Bangalore, at M.S. University, Baroda, and at Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan, Gowda expanded her practice to sculpture and installation, after completing her postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art in London.
This transition responded to the artist`s determination to intervene directly within the space, as well as to actively include the audience within her artwork. More importantly, it was a response to the unstable sociopolitical situation in India in the 1980s and 1990s, associated with the rise of rightwing politics and acts of violence throughout the country.
The artist addressed these concerns through a series of local common materials and everyday objects, with highly metaphorical and political meaning, including cow dung, tar drums, ritual pigments, hair rope, needles, thread and rubber:
With Mortar Line (1996), a floor-based sculpture consisting of a double row of cow dung bricks that form a curved line, she first experimented with cow dung. Considered sacred, cow dung is widely used in rural India for construction and as a fuel.
In the human-hair-based works — remains of the large quantities of hair collected as offerings from thousands of people at pilgrimage sites—are a reference to ritualistic use (as sacrifice for a vow taken), the quotidian (as talismans on motor vehicles) and the economy (the sale of human hair in world markets), presenting it to the audience as a community.
Another distinctive feature of Gowda’s practice is the making process itself, resulting from intensive labor, as in the case of And… (2007), an installation that consists of three cords displayed in the space, each made by threading 270 meters of red thread and anointing them with a paste of glue and kum kum—a pigment used in rituals.
For Gowda, the weight and scale of objects and structures determine audience movement through a space, as can be experienced in the installation Stopover (2012): 200 cubical granite stones—traditional spicegrinding kitchen tools—collected from the streets of Bangalore by the artist.
Remains also conveys her engagement with the process of defining form as a way of transforming meaning. As the artist explains:
"An artwork is the result of decisions taken, choices made. It is true that my work comes from certain specific contexts, but the final nature of the work is shaped to a level of abstraction: the kind of abstraction I am talking about is not only an aesthetic proposition, but one which does not disembowel the work of meaning and allows for a multiplicity of readings."
