Logging in and Out of the Matrix of Faith: Vidya Kamat in Performance  -  Nancy Adajania, February, 2007                                                  

Vidya Kamat likes to pump herself up with divinity. A compulsive deivore with a massive appetite for gods and goddesses, she hunts for her feed on Bombay's bustling pavements, where hawkers do brisk business over an ecumenical pantheon of deities representing every sect, cult and creed. This artist-academic, who researches and teaches comparative mythology by day, turns her hand to digital sorcery by night. Uploaded into Photoshop, her iridescent deities, embossed with gold and silver spangles, lie comatose; they are innocent to the surgery that awaits them. Kamat embeds herself into these images, struggling to fit into their transcendent frames, but always falling a few arms short.

Not one to follow the diktats of well-behaved devotion, she certainly will not settle for a darshan of the gods, the votive experience of seeing and being seen by the Divine. Nor is Kamat’s masquerade a simple impersonation meant to produce an illusion (or perhaps delusion) of the self's divinity. Instead, she haunts the gods unevenly: she mimics, parodies and even ghosts the gestures and postures assigned to them by iconography and popular belief. It is as if she were bound by a curse that can neither be fully grasped nor revoked. Her digital photomontages on archival paper compel us to ask: How far can she stretch the boundaries of faith, before the transmission breaks down and the image distorts into fractals of inarticulacy? What exchanges of value circulate in her economy of personae?

Kamat’s preferred costume, when she inserts her self-image into these divine mises en scenes, is casual: tees and a pair of jeans, or a track suit. The props she edits into the iconographic frame are the informal cane sofa and drapes of her home. A blurring of diagrams occurs between the sacred and the everyday, between the artist’s domestic decor and the templates of popular religious visuality. The sofa becomes Vishnu’s serpent couch and Lakshmi’s lotus turns into a sofa. In 'Tales from the Edge', the artist allows herself an act of delicious heresy, acting out Vishnu's cosmic avatar. As Sheshashayi, the great god lies on the World Snake, giving birth to the demiurge Brahma from his navel; Brahma rises out on an umbilical lotus, and creates the universe. Kamat airbrushes the shadow creator Vishnu out of this scene of cosmic manifestation, leaving a taunting trace of his bejewelled blue chest exposed: hers is a peepshow palimpsest. Clad in a track suit, she puts up her legs and reclines on her living-room sofa in a quintessential TV viewer's pose, her favourite dull gold curtains forming a mock proscenium. Her haunted kohl-lined eyes are made all the more ominous by the golden aura highlighting the contours of her body.

But nothing prepares you for the interruption in a cosmic birth, as when the lotus-stem umbilical cord from her navel disappears in her ghost-white arms. Brahma sits in his lotus womb, suspended over the sofa. The agent of creation has been demoted: he becomes a spectator, along with all the other heavenly hosts assembled to render Vishnu reverence. If Kamat had represented herself in the act of giving birth to Brahma, we might have read this as a neat reversal of gender roles, a fine feminist trope: the subversive replacement of Vishnu, as the primary cosmic principle, by a Devi-surrogate. But Kamat is a complex mythologist who will not let you off with a simple  explanation. Her tracksuit Devi is a generatrix of another kind: she asks us to consider, not so much a predictable feminist parable, as the secret life of images, pressing upon us an alternative interpretation of the given image and our relationship to its potential pluralities. The viewer is not looking, here, at an awe-inspiring cosmogony and its overturning; but rather, at a sophisticated play with art-historical precedents. Kamat's TV-viewing pose is as much a quotation of the original Vishnu posture as it constitutes a visual recall of the female subject in the European tradition from Titian to Manet. We view Kamat's composite images layer by layer, both as a Photoshop device and as a mythologist's manna. Our viewing practice is radicalised as we shuttle like nomads between modernity and mythology, Indic popular culture and Western art history.

A violent erotics is set into motion as the artist bleeds, burns, lassoes, feathers and strokes various layers of visual data to create a composite image in Photoshop. But the degree to which she can possess the sacred realm is curtailed by the modernity of her temperament. Her ability to ‘enter’ Khodiyar Ma or Randal Ma is assured only up to a point, after which this condition of liminality is interrupted -- the trance is broken and the sceptic, the ironist, the agnostic within the artist take over.

The use of Hindu iconography by an Indian artist, whether for votive or parodic reasons, is a fraught choice in the early 21st century. As she logs in and out of the matrix of faith, we are left with a question that exercises all Indian citizens: How is one to be a modern, secularised individual without entirely losing the spell of the sacred? How can we consume the sacred but keep it uncontaminated by politicised religiosity? These questions assume a particular urgency today, because religion has been misused as a banner of hate mobilisation in India since the early 1990s, a period during which the pluralist citadel of the Indian republic has been besieged by pogroms, riots and slander campaigns against the religious minorities.

This crisis of the secular imagination is articulated in Kamat's need to create a new iconography, one that is limited neither by the Right's regressive nor the Left’s evasive reactions to religious expressions in the public sphere. The Hindu Right has mutated, re-produced and circulated powerful traditional icons through a combination of old and new media, in its effort to dominate India's symbolic reality and social space. The orthodox Left is too suspicious of religion to be able to provide a counter-symbolic imagination. Add to that the popular religiosity of self-styled gurus and saints, whose new-age religious projects are organised along the lines of corporate conglomerates. In this cannibalistic economy of faith, running on the steam of competing visualities (in which popular prints, religion channels, darshans communicated via CCTV and the Net), Kamat’s iconographical improvisations are created in a penumbral zone between the ostentatious, even spectacular displays of religiosity and the quiet private reserves of faith.

Kamat’s tentative exploration of the cartography of the sacred began with ‘Rewrite’: her previous exhibition, in which she presented a series of digital photomontages, which laid bare the psychological trauma of a girl who loses the aura of divinity on reaching puberty, having been ritually worshipped as a manifestation of the family deity, the goddess Shantadurga, by her grandfather. Imagine the sense of power wielded by a girl-child over the male members of her family because she occupies a special, if liminal, position in the ritual order. Such a situation, although admittedly true only of the Saraswat Brahmin micro-minority to which Kamat belongs, is certainly special in the broadly patriarchal context of Indian life, where bride-burning and female infanticide are major social evils. Kamat knows that this magico-mythic position of privilege can never be recovered in a secular-cosmopolitan context; but she can have her sweet revenge by haunting the gods back, entering into their bodies, defiling them with the fluids of an ordinary woman.

In the current exhibition, instead of following the trail of her own memories and those of her dear ones -- memories linked to the manifestation of the Divine -- she maps the insatiable need of the masses to consume everything holy. In 'Stain I', for instance, she mimics the pose of the smug deity figure in popular prints. In real life, saintly charlatans wear the same marks of identification: the beatific, otherworldly pose and the look of being possessed by higher powers. Kamat appears as a saint in sneakers, pointing to the unholy alliance between religion and the marketplace.

Although Kamat inserts herself into the images of omnipotent gods and goddesses, her expression is rarely one of triumph; her inserted presence does not mark the easy juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane. A deep-seated melancholia, exacerbated by anxiety, sits on her brow. Even through the morphs of the deity's face, her eyes glow like live embers, the fire not yet spent. 'Lotus Diaries', a sequence of images in which Kamat attempts to inhabit the goddess Lakshmi's universe, her face is always in a state of unpreparedness, burnt with excess light, white as a Chau mask, grey as ash, inert yet alive, always in a state of unrest. Her blessing arms are paralysed; they ghost into a memory of once and forever flight. Finally, the symbols and ambience of the Lakshmi template are completely overshadowed by a thick skin of darkness. And Kamat's body disappears gradually into this veil of maya.

Kamat does the vanishing act often in this suite of works; only to reappear, locate herself, then lose herself in the next round of digital reformatting.  'Wrinkle' finds the artist engaging with the iconography of Randal-ma, where the goddess appears with her twin, her shadow sister. Kamat deploys the metaphor of the self and its shadow as a twin-state to point to the dark side that we all carry within ourselves, and which is necessary to create a balance. The shadow sister is like a 'wrinkle', an out-of-turn fold that breaks the illusion of the perfect self. 

Kamat enters and leaves bodies at will, her gestures of access and exit choreographed as a techno-trance. How much of this experience can be shared with viewers? I can imagine Kamat asking her viewers the question that even the great Adi Shankaracharya could not answer. It is said that the wife of one of his scholarly opponents challenged him: "You claim to know everything about this universe, you give advice to kings and householders, but there are many experiences you have never had, as a celibate and a renouncer. What, for instance, do you know about the experience of living in a woman's body?"

Adi Shankaracharya entered many bodies to extend his experience of the world, but the story remains silent on whether he ever entered a woman's body and experienced its sorrows and its exaltations. Kamat, we may argue, shares a karmic connection with the astute woman who silently defeated the founder of the modern Hindu world-view. She has been sharing the stains, wrinkles and secret folds of a woman's body -- the social and religious taboos that inscribe it, the strategies it adopts to dismantle the cultural damage it has suffered -- with her viewers.

At their deepest level, Vidya Kamat’s digital photomontages are pictures of an impossible ambition, in which a vulnerable, modern, secularized human self attempts the task of achieving a playful parity with the Divine, with the omnipotent source of sacred authority and cosmic order. The unattainability of this goal points up the woundedness of the artist-persona -- a woundedness that carries within it the ache of the Sufi whirling in the raqs-e-bismil, the dance of one mortally wounded by the arrow of divine love, the longing of the thumri singer parted from the beloved who is also the Beloved, and the Chiricovian painter of deserted piazzas and afternoon-heavy palazzos driven by a nostalgia for the infinite. It is a wound that will never heal; that will inspire the artist to greater explanation and greater mystery, to anguish and to epiphany.