Categories: Art

Sher-Gil’s self-portraits are given a new life with this photographic revival

Amrita Sher-Gil, self-portraits, Jawaharlal Nehru University, painter, Samira Bose, Pakhi Sen, Modern Art, Delhi, Vivan Sundaram, Faiza Mookerjee

Amrita Sher-Gil, one of India’s most acclaimed modern painters, is known by anyone who maintains even the slightest interest in the visual arts. But Samira Bose and Pakhi Sen, two budding artists based in Delhi, have gone a little further in their admiration for Sher-Gil’s work.

They have recreated some of Sher-Gil’s self portraits using photography as the medium. The artists dressed themselves and their friends to appear exactly like the Sher-Gil portraits. In other words, they came as close as possible to looking and dressing up like Sher-Gil in her paintings. And the results are remarkably similar – a fitting tribute to the great modernist.

Bose, who is a first-year master’s student at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, studying arts and aesthetics, says, “My first engagement with Sher-Gil happened when I was in fifth standard. In our art appreciation course we were made familiar with artists like Frida Kahlo, Van Gogh, Klint, Sher-Gil and others. But it was a retrospective of Sher-Gil’s works at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi (March 2014) that left me stunned. One image where she is draped in golden cloth stayed with me. I felt a sense of awe towards her. I thought, ‘Look at this woman, probably in her early 20s, with wild hair on one side, laughing at you unabashedly.’ This image displayed a certain freedom and gutsy attitude to me. I felt she defied all the barricades society created for women, especially at that time.”

Bose, after being enrolled in her present course, saw this particular painting almost daily as it was displayed at her department’s library. “There she was again at the entrance of my department’s library and I saw her almost on a daily basis,” she says. “My respect for her only grew.”

As you go through the images prepared by Bose and Sen, you begin to ask yourself if Sher-Gil herself would have liked to explore the medium of photography in the same way. Incidentally, Amrita’s father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, used photography to document his family, and later the artist Vivan Sundaram, Amrita’s cousin, created a series of photomontages titled Retake of Amrita, where he used photographs of Sher-Gil and her family and inserted them in her artworks (as well as in her father’s photos that featured her).

“We are trying to embody the sense of freedom in the heavily patriarchal society she must have come across like we do.”

Talking about the creative inception of her current project, Bose says, “It all started on the Halloween night when Pakhi and I were looking at the updates on our social media account. We saw many of our friends dressed up as Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter known for her self-portraits. We thought, which Indian artist would have a similar influence over people? The name, quite naturally, came to us. It was Amrita Sher-Gil. We immediately decided to do the project.”

For this project the artists approached four of their friends, and have created six photographs in total. In terms of the design and representation of the photographs, the artists used easily available items from their homes. They used fabrics from the boutique of Sen’s mother, who is the owner of a clothing brand. Sen says, “We rummaged through unstitched clothes at the boutique, bed sheets and sarees at home and also included our own clothes for the shoot.”

The entire project neither took much money nor time for its completion. “Everything was spontaneous here. All six photographs were done in one afternoon. We gave 15-20 minutes to one photograph. We did make-up for each other and were ready to go,” adds Sen.

For inspiration, Bose and Sen looked at the works by the Bangalore-based artist Pushpamala N. and the Iranian photographer Azadeh Akhlaghi. Bose says, “We are fascinated by the works of both Pushpamala who brings herself in her many series, and Akhlaghi who recently recreated infamous death scenes from Iran. We read a lot on their respective works and were inspired by them.”

The two were equally moved by Amrita Sher-Gil and tried to find out how freedom looked in a patriarchal society at that time. The end result left them overwhelmed. Bose says, “Amrita is a timeless figure. When we looked at the final images we were surprised as how much we resembled her. We wanted to embody Sher-Gil as at this stage and age, when we are in our early 20s, we are discovering freedom. We are trying to embody the sense of freedom in the heavily patriarchal society she must have come across like we do.”

taru