Influences: Kanchana Gupta

Kanchana Gupta

It is a coincidence and not deliberate that my current artistic influences are both women.

I started reading about the work of Cindy Sherman a few months ago when I was an artist in residence at Objectifs, Singapore. During my residency, I was working on a series of performance-based video works. What attracted me initially to Sherman’s practice was her investigations into the construction of media-mediated images and the nature of representation. Her brilliant unbundling of the process of manufactured stereotypes while simultaneously reclaiming their authorship, has inspired me to look at my own practice differently.

My video-based explorations dissect the narrative of sexualized presentations of the female body specifically in the musical compositions employed in commercial Indian cinema of the 1980s and 90s. I also investigate the process of fabricating a visual identity and the nature of its representation. However, my emphasis is on critiquing specific cultural and visual codes deployed for example monochromatic chiffon saree, music, dance, suggestive movements, rain, intimate settings, etc. Typically, these are used to portray women as erotic constructions in these songs. Artifice and fiction; cinema and performance, and the constructed reality are shared intersections between my work and Sherman’s. I explore these elements in a personal and intimate way to talk about the role these images played in shaping my feminine identity during my formative years. processes like burning, tearing, compressing, and cutting to create objects, paintings, and installations, while pursuing my MFA. That’s when my interest in the works of the Cornelia Parker was sparked, and I am still fascinated by her methodology. I am inspired by how she harnesses the potentiality of materials, fragments them physically and figuratively, and arranges them to create unfamiliar forms, scenarios, and installations. To me, her powerful visual aesthetics represent intellectually complex ideas.

Pushing the limits of materials through various processes to bring about a transformation and the duality of destruction and creation are echoed in my works too. We both play with elements of arranging and sequencing to frame the space. While Parker uses available every day and familiar objects with historical and cultural references, I create my objects through a laborious process of layering oil paint on construction site surfaces such as jute and tarpaulin and subsequently burning and tearing the paint off these surfaces. My work speaks to materials through their absence, traces, and patterns left behind, without any explicit reference to the process. In contrast, Parker’s works reveal the relationship between the object and its action. Her installations appear as if her subjects are frozen and suspended in the moment of their transition, which makes her work monumental.

Learn more about Kanchana’s work at www. sullivanstrumpf.com and read the extensive catalogue from her solo exhibition “458.32 Square Meters” with essays by curator Savita Apte and interviews by Elaine Chiew.