Entangled naked, brown, black and sap-green limbs. The upper halves of the bodies are out of sight. Legs and thighs wrapped and embedded in each other. Fingers sink into the back or squeeze the sole of a foot. The long fluid brush strokes that applied the thin paint on either burlap or board are clearly visible.
Occasionally, the paint drips. Sensory perception—skin against skin, skin against cloth, paint on cloth—is at the core of artist Bhasha Chakrabarti’s work. The title and the contents of her recent exhibition—Skin to Skin—which was on display at Experimenter in Kolkata last month, make this quite obvious. Their erotic charge notwithstanding, these works are not as sexually explicit as many of her other paintings on her Instagram account. In fact, there is a touch of motherly tenderness in some. The curator of the exhibition, Shaunak Mahbubani, aptly begins his note by quoting from radical American writer and activist Audre Lorde’s poem, Recreation, “my body/writes into your flesh/the poem/you make of me”.
“It is difficult to tell which is which, and one form of touch often informs another,” says Chakrabarti, explaining her practice. It was obvious from the work exhibited that the 31-year-old born in Honolulu was more than a little interested in the esoteric cult of Goddess Kali, a feminist icon now. Kali also means ink, and Bhasha, which means language in Bengali, has a clever take on a verse by the fiery Bengali poet and litterateur, Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), where he played on the double meaning of Kali. This work is a footnoted translation of his Shyama sangeet “Amar hathey kali, Mukhey Kali maa” into English.
Having studied political science and economics “with the intention of going into development work”, Chakrabarti was already aware of injustice and inequity. “But I was quite disappointed by both the practical and discursive limitations of actual development organisations I encountered,” she adds. It was only in Harlem in New York City—a hothouse of African-American culture from the 1920s and 1930s—that she plunged into racial and ethnic politics and political art.
Audre Lorde’s Black Unicorn, and books by Kaifi Azmi, Emily Dickinson were displayed on a side table by the bed in the gallery where her studio was recreated at the exhibition. “All these works were made ‘in bed’ and alongside poetry,” the artist says. Exposure to multiple cultures engendered her brand of politics. Her “paintings are done from life”, says the artist, who was never formally trained, but she did go in for open drawing sessions at Art Students League of New York and was “always interested in cloth and weaving”. She continues to take weaving lessons at Fulia in West Bengal and Delhi.
For her Masters in Fine Arts from Yale University in 2022, Chakrabarti’s project involved weaving, film and painting. She adds, “My final thesis project was centred on the original donation that established Yale University, sent to New England by Elihu Yale, a former governor of Madras under the East India Company. The largest component of this donation consisted of textiles handwoven in India. My work rewove the entire donation,” says the Connecticut-based artist.