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Bangalore’s Ironic Ethnograher: Pushpamala

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In the world of four-star hotels, Bangalore offers a sublime local charm and flavor along with the already exquisite accommodations that come with the four-star rating.  Featuring the luxurious lodgings that meet or exceed the industry standards, four-star hotels strive to keep their guests refreshed, catering to all their traveling needs.  With impeccable cuisine, design, and service, guests don’t have to worry about the essentials, and can focus instead on the details that make a vacation memorable.  In Bangalore, there are many distractions to help create excellent memories for the whole family.  With a lively urban center, excellent restaurants and night life, and all sorts of activities that the whole family can enjoy, Bangalore is a fascinating place.

It is one of the few places in the world right now where the residents who have left are starting to return, and in record numbers.  The economic opportunities promised elsewhere have either leveled off, or the economy here has improved so much that it’s impossible not to come back again.  Either way, it makes for an interesting state of cultural flux, where generations are filling in gaps in experience, knowledge, and expectations of India’s present and future that don’t necessarily match memories.  Pushpamala N. is a contemporary Bangalore artist who’s work interrogates the past and present in an incredibly evocative body of work.

The work of Pushpamala N. is very distinctive.  Blurring the boundaries between subject and object, she herself appears as the photographic subject in her work, often in guises that are performative, an often very funny.  The images are icons, stolen from Indian history and legend, and pop culture.  Some of her more incisive works, which have attracted a god deal of critical attention from the international art community, are the ethnographic series she worked on with Calre Arni.  In these, Pushampala N. as the subject from a distant past, presents herself as multiple versions of Indian village women, sometimes with groups, sometimes with a husband, and often alone.  Accompanying these are other images where her skull is being assessed, and other various scientific measurements are taken, in the tradition of early anthropology.  The underlying message here, that the exotic woman is still an object of display, and the barbarism of the past is not behind us, is a potent one in the contemporary art world, and its reiteration in her work has a raw power despite the glint in the subject’s eye.

Related posts:

1. The Bangalore Experience
2. Bangalore’s Prayas Abhinav

Tags: Bangalore, four star hotels, Ironic Ethnograher, Pushpamala

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