Roles People Play

Performance art in India has come of age in Delhi, claims Meera Menezes, as she engages with the work of inspired practitioners from the city.

- Meera Menezes

Pushpamala N. and Mamta G. Sagar. Motherland. First live performance at Samuha Artist's Collective, Bangalore. 30 minutes. 2010. Photograph by Clay Kelton. Image courtesy of Pushpamala N.

THIS ESSAY IS TAKEN FROM THE PERFORMANCE ART ISSUE OF ART INDIA VOLUME XV, ISSUE IV, 2010-11.

In a talk at the Tate Modern, London, art historian Rose Lee Goldberg remarked that if Conceptual Art was the dematerialization of the art object, then Live Performance was the materialization of the art concept. Although 'live art' has a deep history in the West - performances by the Dadaists, the Russian Futurists and contemporary artists like Marina Abramovic, who had a huge show recently at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, are well known this mode of framing 'actual' experience has been slow to gain a foothold in India. Aspects of performances which involve the use of their bodies have been explored by several Indian artists in photographic and video-based works. Performances before a live audience are a recent development though. In the lens-based works, the still or video camera documents the performance of the artist and works as a substitute for a live audience.

The Khoj International Artists' Workshop at Modinagar, New Delhi, has been instrumental in giving a fillip to performance art in India. Unlike private galleries averse to hosting a performance, Khoj offered artists space where they could push the boundaries of their visual vocabularies. Recall the performance in 1999 by Subodh Gupta where he smeared his body with cow dung and mud and lay on a ground, pockmarked with hollows holding embedded objects, or Pushpamala N's Sunehre Sapne (1998), where one saw her in a golden dress and bouffant hairstyle. One also remembers seeing Sonia Khurana in Flower Carrier - 1 and 3 (2006), walking determinedly, holding a plastic flower in front of her.