Artist, Pushpamala N: A lot of my work is about women’s narratives and the kind of stereotypes and archetypes of women.
My name is Pushpamala N. And this is The Navarasa Suite.
The Navarasa actually means the nine moods. Rasa literally means juice. So it’s the juice of an emotion.
I got very interested in performance photography. Somebody told me about the India Photo Studio. Film stars used to come to the studio for publicity portraits of themselves. So I went there and I met this charming man called JH Thakkar, who had started the studio. He used a particular style with light and shade and strong contrast.
The performance in my photographs is very different from theatrical or film performance. In general, I try not to have any expression on my face. So the way I create the mood, or expressions of emotions like love or anxiety, is by the sets and the props and the lighting. It plays with fiction and truth, just with a play of light. That danger does not exist, but because of the deep shadow, and because of the slanting shapes, you feel it’s dangerous.
There are a lot of other things that come into the image. For example, wires and bulbs—things which are not supposed to be in the perfect shot. You immediately see the artifice of it. It’s happening simultaneously, where you know it’s an artifice, but you’re still seduced by it.
Sometimes when people look at my work, though I’ve actually concocted it, it looks very familiar. They’re all heroines of different kinds. There’s a lovelorn heroine, and this kind of fearful woman against the wall. Woman with a dagger, this kind of revengeful woman. These images are repeated over and over again in culture.