Swapnaa Tamhane (MTL)
Finissage: August 6, 5:00 - 6:00 PM at articule for refreshments, then at the park on ave. Fairmount & rue St. Dominique to continue the celebration.
This exhibition is installed in articule’s street-facing window. We invite you to pass by our gallery to see it in person, while maintaining physical distancing guidelines.
The window of articule will be used to present a series of sculptures and drawings. I have been using empty retail spaces for “exhibitions” over the last years, and have been drawn to their immediacy and democratic nature – they belong to everyone and no one. I am interested in forms of display, how value is created and determined, and how culture is utilized as a commodity. Historically, store windows and museums share a mutual enactment of instilling behavioural norms. They also enforced modes of surveillance and self-regulation through multi-leveled, open spaces filled with glass vitrines that carried objects back from the colonies. I am questioning how my own culture has been commodified and represented.
The forms I am presenting oscillate between religious objects, sex toys, or drawing tools. These forms belong to an ongoing body of work in which I am trying to reclaim and decolonize histories of drawing and form-making. My forms can be read as referring to the Hindu god, Shiva, as a lingam or an abstraction, which was deemed a phallus during colonialism. However, I find myself in a bind during a process of a decolonial gesture that risks pushing these forms into the non-secular – a move that is contentious given the current rise of Hindu nationalism in India. These forms also refer to bollards, once used to moor boats to other people’s shores. Now used as street architecture, bollards create car-free zones and have more recently been used as anti-terrorist devices.
Swapnaa Tamhane is an artist, curator, and writer. Her visual practice is dedicated to decolonizing drawing in an attempt to reframe an understanding of form and line. Her process focuses on the presence of her hand in making paper and the treatment of surfaces. She has exhibited her work at Nuit Blanche and A Space Gallery, Toronto; Leonard & Ellen Bina Gallery, Montreal; Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa; and has upcoming exhibitions at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, and the Sculpture Park, Jaipur.
Exhibition Text
On Being Your Own Reference
Text by Joyce Joumaa
Swapnaa Tamhane’s vitrine-based exhibition In Reference To emerges from a questioning of the value of objects in relation to the space in which they are presented. How is a space created through an object’s relationship to it, and how is the reading of the object’s value affected by the means of access to it? These artworks invite the audience to look closely while offering space for critical reflection on their locale. They remind us to ask why some objects end up existing in a museum space while others exist in a street-window shop.
The meaning of these shapes stands at the core of a tension created around the objects which are mainly inspired by religious symbolism, sex toys, and utensils. They enter a state of flux in an attempt to “seduce” as they are presented in a window space. Looking at modes of exhibiting that perpetuate acts of exchange, we can think of how culture is commodified and thus read. The very same forms can be seen as a reference to kitchen utensils which suggests a look at a feminist history of toolmaking. It can also refer to the divine, the erotic, as well as the oppressor. The artist reflects on “mistranslation” and “misreading” as two concepts that were embedded within anthropological and ethnological practices. The act of referencing, or “captioning” implies a sense of expectation that depends on the proximity of the gaze which looks at a culture.
The objects on display are mainly inspired by drawing, Tamhane’s main artistic practice. Considering some of the sculptures as being themselves drawings, the work is an attempt to decolonize the concept of drawing while the molding of the form resists a defined reading of it. The artistic process becomes a model for self-assertion that looks at drawing from a personal perspective that is freed from a Western understanding.
Swapnaa Tamhane’s works portray a critical engagement in understanding this proximity and in reflecting on the etymology of the words “Shiva”, “phallus”, and “lingam”. In Reference To invites us to question the politics of communication, reminding us that a reference does not liberate the gaze from being doubted.