The Female Gaze

Erasure seems to be a constant theme in the works of women artists at the 15th edition of the India Art Fair

- Rakhi Bose

A yellow tarp wall with myriad cow dung cakes forms the centre stage of conceptual artist Mayuri Chari’s latest exhibit. The almost bucolic landscape changes when one steps closer to the wall and the dung cakes take on a familiar shape. They start to look like vaginas. In fact, they are vaginas moulded in cow dung, a take on the holiness attributed to the cow and the stigma of menstruation that women must undergo.

Chari, who hails from a village in Goa, often felt like an outcast when she would get her periods. She became the untouchable. “In our country, cow dung is considered pure enough to be used in religious rituals but menstruating women are banished,” she says. The yellow tarp has many associations for her—of rains, slums, temporary homes and a shield itself. The vaginas are pasted on this yellow in parallel lines, almost giving a sense of discipline akin to military ranks. They subsume everything else around them. It is provocative, disruptive and familiar.

Through the series titled ‘Does Everything Belong To Me?’ exhibited recently at the 15th India Art Fair, Chari tries to raise questions about body politics, exploitation and hegemonic fetishisation of female labour.

While depicting the universal female experience of being the ‘other’, Chari’s work also sheds light on the exploitation of women’s labour in informal sectors. The tarp is a reminder of the sarees these migrant workers from Maharashtra’s Kolhapur region use as walls of privacy in the overcrowded labour camps they live in for months. “These women are asked to remove their uterus so that they don’t fall sick while menstruating in unhygienic conditions and miss work,” Chari states.