Ashwini Bhat's first solo exhibition in India
Desire Moving Through, or Five Steps in a Journey to the Beginnings of Relation
By Tausif Noor
Let us walk, together
To say that the transdisciplinary practice of Ashwini Bhat, spanning ceramic sculptures and installations, videos, and performance, is deeply entangled with the artist's respect for the natural world-that is, the organic, the non-human, and the more-than human-is to speak one partial truth. With this truth, we can begin to understand how Bhat's walks along her local Northern California landscape-through towering thickets of redwoods and across forest floors once scorched by flames, now teeming with new life-embedded themselves deep into the folds of her abstract ceramic sculptures and across the skin of their sinuous forms and textured surfaces. Tracing this path alongside Bhat, we expand the possibility of understanding the self in its expanded field, a "self that touches all edges," to quote Wallace Stevens. [1]
Across her significant bodies of self-portraits, Bhat articulates a philosophy of the self that is connected to, yet distinct and autonomous from, the natural world, expressing this philosophy through the formal poetics of her installation. Centuries-old motifs come together in familiar images, but the very formation of the work is idiosyncratic to the artist and to the space, who molded each individual clay fragment by laying thinly stretched, wet clay along the contours of her body, treating the material like a second skin-coterminous, yet distinct.
Bhat, who trained in classical dance form of Bharatnatyam for nearly two decades, has here designed a careful choreography between figurative and abstract form, across rich colors, and indeed, across two distinct geographic and cultural landscapes, drawing as much from the terrain of California, where she has been living since 2017, and that of her own rich South Indian heritage. In doing so, the artist nimbly brings to bear in her work what the Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant termed the "poetics of relation." As the writer Manthia Diawara has noted, Glissant eschewed the notion of difference as the "oppositional discourse of the same and the other," and instead theorized difference as "an assembler of the 'dissimilar." [2] Put another way: to be in relation is not to flatten distinctions nor to erect rigid boundaries between entities and categories, but to respect what is dissimilar and unique in the Other while at the same time maintaining the possibility to move with and across differences. Glissant's poetics of relation thus privileges the ever-present potential for connection over isolation.
In Her Nature, Bhat attunes her audience to the stakes of comparison and similarity, of the urgent task of understanding what it means to be in sympathetic relation with the Other-of what it means to honor difference and let ourselves be open to transformation. Across so many spiritual practices in the Indian subcontinent and globally, transformation is the only consistency in a physical and psychic world defined by roiling change. And thus, Ashwini Bhat's gestures speak to the necessary element of contingency that defines a poetics of relation: those which can be formed and reformed from multiple desires, from the interactions between and within bodies and the natural world. In so doing, the artist upholds the ethical principle of recognizing difference without distinction between humans and nature, modeling an equanimity that can extend to every fragment of daily life.
(An excerpt from Tausif Noor's longer exhibition essay)
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[1] Wallace Stevens, “A Rabbit as the King of Ghosts,” Poetry, Vol. 51, NO. 6: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Number (October 1937). Accessed via Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21816/a-rabbit-as-king-of-the-ghosts.
[2] Manthia Diawara, "Édouard Glissant’s Worldmentality: An Introduction to One World in Relation,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 42-43 (November 2018), 20-27: 26. https://doi.org/10.1215/10757163-7185713
