’In our idleness, in our dreams' is a three-person show that features Ashish Avikunthak, Jai Chuhan and Jacqueline Utley. The title of the show is based on a line from Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own': “Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” The show meditates on how women have used domestic spaces to create, converse and to articulate their presences and identities in ways that are not circumscribed by men.
These spaces are often domestic because public, corporate and political spaces have been prioritised or indeed at times, exclusively reserved for men. In this show each of the three artists sets their work within such spaces, and through that re-inscribes these rooms as not merely being ‘domestic’ settings but spaces that are productive and vital. In doing so these settings become as those spaces that have been historically dominated by, and by and large continue to be dominated by male subjectivities.
Ashish Avikunthak’s film ‘Endnote (Antaral)’ is based on the short Samuel Beckett play ‘Come and Go’. Avikunthak’s work mirrors the structure of Beckett’s play which follows three women reminiscing about past times together. At different points one of the characters whispers a secret to a second about the third who is at that moment out of earshot. Each of them do this in turn, and it is not clear if it is the same secret each whispers or a different secret as the viewer is never privy to what message is being passed between the characters. Avikunthank re-reads Beckett through a lens of Indian ritual and tantric belief systems, subtly reinforcing the sense that there is set of shared meanings between the protagonists that we are not necessarily privy to.
Jai Chuhan’s paintings often depict a female figure or figures in room-like interiors. These are ambiguous spaces where we see figures who are blurrily glimpsed as if our moment of seeing them can only be partial or fleeting. The poses of the figures reference Indian dance traditions as well as ragas, Indian musical compositions which use improvisation within a melodic framework in order to evoke specific emotions. Chuhan uses intensely worked surfaces to create a sense of movement and productive vitality to these settings. Like the female characters in Avikunthak’s ‘Endnote’ or the women who populate Jacqueline Utley’s paintings, it is not clear whether the figures in these works want to be seen or wish for privacy. The rooms they are in can be understood as a space of refuge or retreat, from where the outside world can then be negotiated from.
Jacqueline Utley’s paintings quietly explore the gendered spaces that women have occupied for living, working and making. Utley’s own family history of women working in textile mills in the north of England has fed into her interest in researching sources that documented the lives of women workers from the early part of the twentieth century. In her paintings we see women sitting or standing, talking with each other or simply co-inhabiting the same spaces. Sometimes they are working, sewing or stitching. Utley has stated that she often starts out with an idea what the conversations between the female figures in her paintings might be, again suggesting that a set of private meanings and associations is at work always out of the reach of an external presence.
The domestic interior as a space for female subjectivity to articulate a “submerged truth” runs as a theme through these works. Those truths emerge from moments of contemplation, making, whispering, talking or sometimes simply being. These truths might be small or profound, but each asserts the importance of being able to claim a space from which to articulate the self. As viewers, we are not automatically given access to what these truths might be. Instead, at a slight distance we watch something unfold from these domestic interiors and inexorably widen from that to become part of the fabric of lives lived and the wider world.
For more information please email Georgia Griffiths, georgia@niruratnamcom
