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Paintings
Based on images from the Bollywood film industry, anthropological, scientific, and police file photos, these works investigate social codes at work in mass media imaginings of South Asian culture. By highlighting the violence and performative artifice inherent in popular representations of gender and class,
the works explore problematics of representation in the post-colonial era.
These contradictions emerge in the paintings, where women are figured as
both perpetrators and victims of violence; as simultaneously compliant and subversive.
The Bollywood system itself is significant as a model of contradiction: although appearing to reflect certain structures of the Western Hollywood system, it has surpassed a mere colonial framework, becoming a vast and powerful institution with its own mythologies. Paintings exploit and dismantle these mythologies -- the restoration of feminine virtue by masculine authority, the necessity of heterosexual union, bound up with 'authentic' culture, and social reproduction, for narrative closure. Works expose how female sexuality is racialized, and how sexual codes are established by performance. I integrate anthropological, scientific, and film imagery to suggest that symbolic violence cuts across oppositional visual regimes, in that anthropology, as a scientific discourse,
sees its goal as the elucidation of fact rather than fictive narrative.
While the project creates space for narratives excluded from visual regimes maintained by National Geographic magazines or Hindi films, my intention is
not ‘substituting a 'correct' ethnic image for an 'incorrect' one.’ The work doesn’t seek to recover an idealized model of female subjectivity. Rather, it intervenes into dominant visual systems, rubbing against the narrative grain by asking
how images are constructed. |
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