The relationship between an artist and history is symbiotic, imbued with inquisitiveness and outlier answers. Provocative artist Pushpamala N’s visit to an archaeological museum in her city, Bengaluru triggered a deep curiosity for ancient inscriptions. The result is ‘Epigraphica Indica’, a solo show on ancient inscriptions at Gallery Sumukha. Among her pieces on display are Atlas of Rare and Lost Alphabets (2015-2018) and Nara (2020-2022) executed at different times but perfectly meshing with each other. Both works highlight the power of words, be it through the beauty of languages or through slogans designed to arouse emotions. The set of hundred copper plates or sculptures, as she calls them, are inscribed with old scripts of languages from the Indian sub-continent.
“We look at Persian and other such languages as examples of calligraphy. When I began to examine the old tongues from the sub-continent, I was enthralled by the embedded history in them,” says Pushpmala, an alumnus of the MSU, Baroda. Scouring the internet had led her to 50 to 60 old scripts from Karnataka to the Maldives. She was fascinated by their distinct flourishes. Working on the plates by hand, she transcribed the letters on copper surfaces.
After an elaborate time-consuming process preparing the plates, she dipped them in an acid bath to give them the ancient and mysterious look. The patina on the plates, often bright copper sulphate blue, bequeathed the illusion of antiquity. “It’s interesting to go through the scripts and discover business transactions of yore. Sometimes, the documents would have grand formal script on the first page and local language scripts in the rest,” says the artist who started out as a figurative sculptor. Of course, like many accomplished artists there is an element of explorative narcissism— in her early works, she herself is visual protagonist of her representations and photo-romances in the 1990s.
Pushpamala is a significant voice in Bengaluru’s art world, with her strongly feminist creative idiom and subversive interventions. She is singular yet manifold—an artist whose many dimensions accept collaborations which are unified into one reality. Artists are political, with a liberal worldview. Pushpamala’s second series, Nara, is hard-hitting recording of the recent protests in the country. Fifty copper sculptures, designed to look like school slates, are inscribed with slogans such as ‘I AM GAURI’ (after murder of the artist’s good friend, activist Gauri Lankesh), ‘FREE DISHA NOW’ (imprisonment of activist Disha), ‘WE WILL RESIST’ (against CAA, NRC, CAB), to name a few.
Some of her iconic works include the photo series ‘Native Women of South India’ (2000-2004) and a compelling performance called ‘Gauri Lankesh’s Urgent Saaru’ (2018) in which Pushpamala was dressed as Mother India and cooked rasam for the audience. It was a way to remember her slain friend. Infusing her work with a strong political message is what one could expect of Pushpamala, who has been described by Nature Morte Gallery as the ‘most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art’. Not without reason.