JOIN USWhen one person’s waste becomes another’s piece of artwork, the result is usually stunning. In New York-based Indian artist Samanta Batra Mehta’s case, it’s unique.
She uses ‘waste’ — rather old knick-knacks and oddities, some even a century old — to create her own contemporary version of art. Which means that historical maps, antiquarian books, clocks, shoes, glasses, bottles and similar others get a whole new lease of life in the form of installations that tell a story. In her recent exhibition in India titled ‘The Other Side of Time’, it’s her insatiable collector’s appetite combined with her artistic self that came to the fore.
The exhibition was a showcase of odds and ends collected over the years, and from various parts of the world, and artistically intertwined with Batra Mehta’s own design and imagination to create narratives that are echoes of personal and colonial history, gender constructs and social order. The themes in her exhibition are more on the personal, a reflection of the stage that Batra Mehta is most preoccupied with at the moment. “My art is actually influenced by the different stages of my life. At present, it’s my family, children, my memories that are central to my life,” says the young artist, who has trained in traditional Byzantine icon making.
Batra Mehta has been a compulsive collector, especially antiquarian books, from an early age and when she realised that she could do more with the ‘static objects’ that filled her cupboards and desks, she embarked on a fascinating journey of giving her objects a re-purpose. “It took me a while to cut up my old books, maps and lithographs, but I realised that I had to recontextualise them, otherwise they would end up just gathering dust,” says Batra Mehta, who spent her growing up years in Mumbai.
That was three years ago. Today, she can proudly show off her collection. The 50-odd vintage postcards that she has collected, dating from 1945-50, make for an intriguing installation called ‘Anthem’. On each postcard she has collaged imagery from antiquarian medical journals, especially images from the nervous system. On some of the postcards, she has even collaged parts of Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘Tyrst with Destiny’ speech. The postcards are a repository of the social history of India during and after Partition. These are the untold stories of people who lived through Partition, a subject that has a personal resonance for her.
Her grandparents moved from Punjab in Pakistan during Partition to New Delhi and began life all over again as refugees. It’s to them and thousands others who went through the trauma of being uprooted that she dedicates the installation ‘The Other Side of Time’. She uses a wooden cabinet and fills it with vintage glass bottles dating back to the 1900s, antiquarian maps, prints, collaged texts, vintage clock and medicinal and laboratory glass to create her ‘cabinet of curiosities’.
It is, as she says, a “receptacle and memento mori of those who made this tumultuous crossing, and a kind of remembrance of the inheritance of loss”. This installation has been inspired by a similar glass-fronted almirah in her grandparents’ home which was filled with a collection of objects and curiosities that stood testament to the journeys they had made.
“I explore various themes such as family histories, migration, displacement, personal identities, gender construct and post-colonial theory through my works. As a mother bringing up two children, as a diasporic artist living in New York, as a grandchild of the Partition — all these concerns inform my work,” says the artist.
In her installation ‘Rites of Passage’, a decoupage on vintage wooden shoe moulds, she reflects on her childhood, relocation to New York, and motherhood, and how the adopted foreign land is the home of her children now. In ‘Here I Lie In My Own Separate Skin’, Batra Mehta, who is also a photographer, uses two photographs shot in an Egyptian village and superimposes a woman in bare back and a veil on the photo. This work looks at issues of identity, displacement, dislocation and negotiation of our identities based on our skin colour.
The theme of skin, she says, is used as a mask, veil and marker of socio-cultural self. ‘Anthropology of Time’ is an interesting piece of work. Using four antiquarian editions of John Stoddard’s India and the Passion Play which are juxtaposed with plastic plants bought from Chinese and Thai importers in Manhattan, Batra Mehta brings in the outside-insider viewpoint. She writes in the concept note: “As I journeyed back ‘home’ over the past 10 years, I realised that I unconsciously assumed the position of a critical commentator, onlooker and observer of the changes I saw in urban India. Upon self-reflection, I realised that even while I oftentimes felt ire upon reading Stoddard’s commentaries, I myself unconsciously slipped into creating conclusions based on my position as a Western-educated, Western-returned ‘NRI’ to my native land...”
Batra Mehta, who holds degrees in Economics and Information Systems from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and the London School of Economics, has no regrets about giving up a promising career in banking, venture capital and international shipping. Art is a passion and she is content being a full-time artist. After all, her works are part of private collections in the US and India, as well as in Italy’s prestigious Fondazione Fotografia Cassa di Risparmio di Modena. So, for Batra Mehta, the canvas can never remain blank for too long, or should we say the cabinets are waiting to be filled with more curiosities?