an essay on the practice of (now) Dhaka based artist Vinita Karim
curated by Shristi Sainani
published by Gallerie Nvya, New Delhi
Sedimented Topologies
in the visual practice of Vinita Karim
by Anuj Daga
In ‘Invisible Cities’, one of Italo Calvino’s most celebrated novels, the Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo makes vivid to the aging Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan, the life as lived in the lands of his empire that he may no longer be able to physically experience. At the outset, Calvino disclaims that, "Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." Polo goes on to narrate a post-factual account of fifty-five cities he has visited that, he reveals eventually, share features in common. My task here is to similarly sit by Karim’s artworks and closely observe the ideas hewn in the palimpsest of her landscapes. In other words, this essay tries to excavate the sedimented topologies in the works of Vinita Karim. Could Karim’s artistic practice be a visual allegory to Calvino’s storytelling technique in Invisible Cities?
Looking at Vinita Karim's visual works in succession is much like reading through the chapters of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In the manner of the thematically organized city-titles in Calvino’s novel, Karim’s artworks are kaleidoscopic impressions of various urbanscapes that are created with paints and patches of embroidered fabric, on surfaces flat or spherical. More often than not, their geographies are characterised by an interaction of land and water within which different patterns of life settle in varied forms. Water bodies and landmasses get defined by each other and are sites of active inhabitation in Karim’s renderings – a fact that may be inferred even without the visible presence of a single human being. It is the assemblage of houses, ships, scaffolds, bridges and boats in their vibrant colours and eventful details that remain as key traces of thriving human activity. In the careful orchestration of these elements of inhabitation within her works, Karim mounts the architecture of her own topological manoeuvrings in every artistic iteration.
Karim’s orientation to space has been fundamentally informed through the constant crossover from city to city that happened over the decades by virtue of firstly, her father who kept relocating due to his work in the Indian Foreign Services, and later her partner whose work in tele-communications took them to places. From being born in Burma, schooled in Sudan, Kuwait and Pakistan, studying art (and business) in Stockholm and Sweden, and further traveling with her partner to Philippines, Egypt as well as India until settling in Dhaka in 2010, Karim’s life so far has been about perpetually making home in transition. How does one articulate a common language through which topological diversity of different lands may be hewn together? Further, what could we discern through the visual accounts that fold in the multiplicity of cultural landscapes in Karim’s artworks? Lastly, how does one read the inscription of “home” within visuals that themselves seem to index multiple locations?
In addressing the above questions, a conceptual opening of ‘sedimented topologies’ may serve helpful. In geology, sedimentation refers to matter that has been deposited by some natural process. It takes place when suspended particles settle within a fluid environment due to various forces acting upon them. On the other hand, in mathematics, topology (Greek for ‘place, location’) is concerned with those geometrical and physical properties that get preserved under continuous deformations such as stretching, twisting, crumpling or bending. The visual outputs of Karim’s practice are much like sedimented topologies, that attempt to preserve values of various geographies while in transition. The landscapes in her works are iterative acts of placemaking, where the heterogeneity of encountered landscapes is woven through the continuity of experience. In what follows, I will open up the mechanics of Karim’s artistic language.
Sedimented Topologies
Most of Karim’s works are carefully choregraphed assemblages of place and time. The artist intuitively employs the device of the cross-section that is frequently used in scientific processes to cut through something in a single plane. Such an action exposes to us the simultaneity of events that are visually organized in horizontal or vertical layers. For example, a cross section of the earth shall allow us to observe the different layers of soil deposits as they get placed one above another over time. A similar anatomical approach can be observed in Karim’s representation, where the canvas is visually stacked layer by layer vertically as well as in depth. The viewer’s gaze is grooved into the layers created within these multiple dimensions. In deploying such a visual language, the artist brings the compositional traditions of the East - particularly the Mughal miniatures constructed using flattened perspective technique or the deviating oblique planes of traditional Chinese or Japanese landscape paintings - in dialogue with the planar orthographic projections of the West.
The attributes indicated above can be demonstrated in considering several works across Karim’s career. For example, in her work ‘Offshore’ (2015), the canvas is vertically composed of the horizontal bands of earth, river, banks, city, mountains and the sky. In ‘Alizarin Sky’ (2015), rows of boats, series of bridges, flowing streams, elevated roads, a landscape of mountain crests, a distant cityscape and then the sky placed one above the other create a quiet night-scape. ‘Rhythm of the River’ (2018) yet again plays with horizontally floating masses of boats or lands that make each other within a large river along which an old settlement plays hide and seek between bridges and boulders – all occurring successively in a vertical axis. ‘The Magical Moon’ (2021) literally appears like the cross-section of a large ship that almost carries a city in its different tiers. A multitude of microcosms get created as well as framed within the outlines of the elements within Karim’s layered scenographies. They appear as sediments of time deposited over one another.
What could be the philosophical underpinnings of Karim’s expression and how do we come to experience it? Three specific visual tropes seem to set the coordinates through which the artist navigates her physical and metaphysical world. If the work of art is understood as a reflection of the artist’s inner reconciliation with the events of her life, then Karim’s expressions offer the promise of floating, bridging and dancing as the principal means of mediating a migratory life. These could be methods of meaning making through which the artist makes place amidst the uncertain waves of transition and transformation. Let me explicate upon these three meta-acts as extracted through her imageries:
a. Floating
Water remains one of the key elements in most of Karim’s paintings. Seas, streams, rivers and estuaries hold within them a constantly floating world – from fishes, to boats, to sails, to rocks, to cities and even islands if one may will. Large bodies of land become islands or archipelagos whereas cities seem to have settled over centuries by the water. Through a clever use of shapes, Karim is able to gesture to the many ecologies that thrive in and around water. In the end, water comes to frame the cities as in the eye-view of a distant bird. Swimming is a motif of placemaking in Karim’s world. It allows the translation of the factuality of constant movement into a spatial continuum. Much like migratory species that keep moving to the currents of climate, Karim’s geographical transitions find meaning thus into drifting drafts of time.
Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has used the metaphor of “flow” in order to explain the process of rapidly changing cultural landscapes in the era of new globalization, characterised by the intensified circulation of media, objects as well as individuals themselves. Implicated into this very phenomenon, Karim’s responses could be read as a practice of immersion, a deep dive into the interrogation of the politics of situatedness itself. These take deeper meaning when her paintings slide from the flatness of the canvas into the spherical surface of the fibre glass eggs. In her sculpture series, Karim coats an object – a symbolic shell contained by, and containing within it the fluid of life - with the very expression of flow. In doing so, the artist suspends the viewer in the soupy scales of the egg and the earth at once – orbs that keep their worlds stable while they float in water and air respectively.
b. Bridging
If floating displaces, bridging connects. Bridging is a constant act in Karim’s work. Long stretches of elevated bridges occur in many of her imageries suggesting crossing over, passing, transgressing borders, passing by, continuities between land to land, and even painting to painting. Bridges are not just physical devices to cross rivers or continents in Vinita Karim's work, rather they remain conceptual means of traversing time too. The sequence of arched bridges appear like film strips through which microcosms beyond are screened and revealed. The visual interplay between the background and the foreground of these bridges produces a pairing of the past and present into loops of time. The frames are spatio-temporal windows through which memories of the transforming cityscape dialogue with each other.
In 2010, when Karim shifted to Dhaka, she sought to incorporate local artisanal dimensions in her works. The aspect of embroidered patterns alongside acrylic paints has since then, remained an integral part in her canvases as an imprint of cultural collaboration. In Karim's works, the embroidered patches seamlessly blend into portions of painted canvas, yet producing their own topology of sorts. They visualise a mosaic of human settlement within the details of facades, fenestration and folds that shape the urban fabric. At other instances, they display floating life-forms within the fluid waterbodies. The stitching of embroidered portions within her paintings, one may argue, signifies the bridging of cultures, merging artistic forms, making place for cultural diversity and preserving heterogeneity. Further, the bridges propped up on semi-circular arches allude to the act of needlework itself - wherein one is able to imagine the work of city as a weave. Combining the mode as well as the material, the bridges come to sew a seamless landscape in Karim’s artworks.
c. Dancing
A carnivalesque energy grips the viewer in the colourful palettes of Karim’s compositions. Such a perpetual festivity is strategically orchestrated through a distinct use of colour and form. Within the overall mood of every canvas, the artist throws the viewer into a plethora of colours that converse playfully with each other. They appear as refracted landscapes in their fragmented topographies. Karim’s landscapes are not composed of hard straight lines, rather, they fold, bend, warp, deflect and deform gently moving up and down. It is these animated undulations between the crests and troughs of the mountains and waves that choreograph Karim’s urbanscapes – as if painted in the image of the gestures of a musical conductor.
The architecture of the scaffold frequently reappears in Karim’s works. Delicate dancing sticks hover over built forms and become frameworks for tents, pandals, drying or mounting stuff that sustains everyday life on the one hand, whereas they also take on structural forms of the jetties, decks, walkways, or even infrastructures for repair and renovation of settled urban fabrics. The standing and swaying of light infrastructures mounted onto these otherwise settled forms strike a lyrical chord to which we begin to dance in joy. They produce a gliding tension in the juxtaposition of the permanent with the temporary, the heavy with the light, in materiality as well as content – in effect producing a phenomenon of lively buoyancy – the ballet of the eye.
Floating, bridging and dancing is the process in which sedimented topologies of Karim’s artistic landscapes shape themselves. Following the above discussion, one is now compelled to wonder if the Mineral Series (2020-21) in which Vinita experiments with various pigments and minerals on canvases could be a material proof for such a conceptual proposition? In releasing the solidified rock-forms into her visual expressions, Karim presents to us an elaborate annotation underlying her extensive artistic practice. In studying these works, one finds crystallization of the elementary vocabulary as well as the grammar of the artist’s visual language.
Beyond material analysis however, could the three ideas also serve as poignant metaphors for a way of negotiating a transitory life, those that may be the quiet proposition of Karim’s art? Sitting by these artworks then may offer hope to the nomads who may never have the luxury of settling, or to the likes of Kublai Khan who may never have the chance to travel into the expanses of his entire empire. Karim’s paintings must be read as spatio-experiential maps, that offer comfort to both such minds. The artist has certainly covered as much as created a vast geography in the probability of finding a site for a home.
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images from Vinita's works in the archives of Gallery Art & Soul, Worli, Mumbai.
Working Notes
