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<td width="60%" align="left" valign="top">Walls of the womb (2008)

<a href="http://www.reenakallat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Walls-of-the-womb.jpg"><img src="http://www.reenakallat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Walls-of-the-womb.jpg" alt="Walls-of-the-womb" title="Walls-of-the-womb" width="600" height="400" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-375" /></a>
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<h2 class="painting">Walls of the womb
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<span class="painting">2008
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‘He looked at his own Soul 
With a telescope. What seemed 
all irregular, he saw and 
shewed to be beautiful
Constellations, and he added
to the Consciousness hidden 
worlds within worlds.’
 	
S. T. Coleridge, Notebooks


Scrolls dyed in different dialects of red fall sheer from a height and kiss the floor. On them, numerous white circles project out like curious eyes. Or are they constellations of stars on a sky-cloth? You cannot decipher the pattern on the scrolls, but a glass case in one corner of the room has books whose pages secrete closely packed, yet legible words. They appear to be recipes for preparing Indian and Continental food.

Reena Saini Kallat’s installation, ‘Walls of the Womb’, is an edifice built from silk saris that hang like amplified scrolls echoing her mother’s absence. The artist’s mother did not live long enough to drape a sari around her daughter’s waist, a coming-of-age ritual in India. This sensuous garment has millennially held many secrets, scents and desires in its folds. Crafted in many weaves and textures, it can be as light as dew, transparent as water or opaque as night. This garment signals a woman’s modesty but also invites erotic play. 

Here, the saris stand like a memorial, an elegy for a body that the artist remembers only faintly; she lost her mother when she was eight. As a child, Reena tried to construct a portrait of her mother through family lore and by running her hand blindly over her belongings, her saris, cosmetics, books and bags. I suspect that her vocation as an artist helped Reena to recover a sense of wholeness, to wipe out the colour of lack from her life. That is why her paintings and sculpture installations are constructed like spells to ward off the forces of conflict and chaos besieging the body and, by extension, the body politic. You would find a politically contested site lying like a dormant tumour in a steel cradle (Penumbra, 2006) or smeared across anonymous portraits (Penumbra Passage (Canine Cases), 2006). Denial of her mother’s affection has been projected into an extended narrative of belonging: over the years, Reena has obsessively made hundreds of rubber stamps bearing the names of Indian citizens from different castes and religions, who have been deprived of basic freedoms by the Indian state.

This secret history of Reena’s work comes to light in ‘Walls of the Womb’, her first explicitly autobiographical work. Having herself become a mother two years ago, Reena has tried to make peace with her beleaguered self. She has exorcised her mother’s memories by celebrating her courage. Her mother fought the pain of cancer with beauty, making exquisite flower arrangements, fabric paintings and costumes for Reena and her brother.
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<a href="http://www.reenakallat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Walls-of-the-womb-detail.jpg"><img src="http://www.reenakallat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Walls-of-the-womb-detail-703x1024.jpg" alt="Walls-of-the-womb-detail" title="Walls-of-the-womb-detail" width="703" height="1024" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-374" /></a>
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