HYDERABAD: The sun rises on her forehead. Kali herself resides in her Aravali kumkum. She churns cosmos on her canvas. She’s Tvamevaham. She’s artist Sravanthi Juluri. The Sanskrit word that defines her is taken from Narayana Upanishad which means ‘you are me and I am you or we are one’ connecting all the souls in this world to a higher consciousness: part of Brahma itself.
The same word was splintered into an amalgam of art works, live music and natya performance by the artist. The event titled Tvamevaham was performed at Goethe Zentrum Hyderabad to a houseful of audience. This blend of art form was quite new to the art aficionados in the city.
While talking to Koeli Mukherjee Ghose, city-based artist and curator of the event, she decided that installation, light, dance, theatre, music, art, everything will come together to talk about the navarasas the Indian Natya Shastra depicts. Sravanthi says, “Everything is based on navarasas, even architecture is based on that. In the performance I blended them all like my paintings that flow with emotions which don’t have shape; collectively they are a big burst of energy. Tvamevaham is experiencing the divine. You become one with Brahma.” She became art herself performing on the tunes of flute and mridangam.
Her persona appeared to be of flames and in unison with the red light her crimson kurta was bathed in. Her performance was a dialogue of the artist, her artworks, the audience and cosmos itself. Everything was fluid with red – the symbolism transcending death and resurrection much like what the fire of Adonis denoted. Sravanthi dips her finger in the womb of cosmos turning upside down the volcanic energy that seeps into everything. The fire spreads onto her canvas, blazing, angry, flamboyant, exuberant.
The colour red seems to have chosen her. The red bindi on her forehead appears to be a full-stop to the turbulent phase of her life that she so sturdily survived. The resplendence translated itself between artist’s conversation on-stage with her alter ego played by Lanka Vaishnavi. And thus began the internal dialogue between the artist and the art.
Her mental confinement came on stage with the rasas pinned on her back as kerchiefs that her alter ego plucked one by one like thorns being taken out from flesh. And the wound was red, with a heart in it; an eye that showed the audience what the artist went through during her violent marriage. What seemed to flow out on her paintings hung around was raw energy –- dark, unchanneled taking its own form on her canvases like catalytic oceans churning out the venom, pulling the entire surroundings in their centre that splits and divides the work into two hemispheres perhaps belonging to the turbulence of great floods in the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’. The abstract forms that Sravanthi specialises in, flitted around her in waves.
“This was more like a statement that I am making on behalf of other artists when I was questioned about my blend of performance with art,” shares the artist whose mother yesteryear actress Jamuna was teary seeing her daughter’s turbulence unfurl.
She follows her instinct and loves working with layers. She works wet on wet and plays with the colours bringing up the bottom layers up. Her son, little seven-year-old artist Avish Juluri advises her not to use too much of red, white and black. That’s how we see Fauvistic waves in her artworks that have mellowed down from being volcanic to tiny sparks of embers that wait for the uncontrollable Kali to stop as figment of time and smile with the same refulgence as that of a fiery flower growing all by itself in a forest.
The splash of colours are offerings in the temple of art that swirl, rise, appear and disappear chronicling the narrative of sunrise and sunset. Lacan may have called it the blooming of phonetics.
(Screening & exhibition: On till November 12, 9:30 am to 6:30 pm, Hamburg Hall, Goethe-Zentrum)