New Delhi, Oct 11 (Inditop.com) Daddy tastes like tangy soup – if you have the gall to kill him and gouge out his lungs. The daddy broth by Estonian artist Marko Maetamm is part of a set of four graphic art compositions in water colour with accompanying texts.
“Mammy feels like crispy croquets” if strangled with a pillow in sleep and her legs and ears are cooked with carrots, milk, butter and breadcrumbs, says the artist. The dish can be served piping hot.
Maetamm’s works – he calls it “The Little Family Cookbook” series – are a comment on domestic violence which is the theme of an art exhibition, “Home, Sweet Home”, at the Arts.I gallery owned by the Religare Arts Initiative at Connaught Place in the capital.
The offbeat exhibition which features graphic art, digital art, live installation and conventional canvas art, tries to probe different forms of abuse and domestic discord – both subtle and apparent – found almost in every home across the globe.
Curated by New York-based Italian artist and curator Ombretta Agro Andruff and supported by the Institute of Italian Culture, the 20-day exhibition opened Oct 5.
It showcases a body of cross cultural works by contemporary artists from Europe, the US and India.
“In most of Maetamm’s works, fear and humour are woven together to become the recurrent motifs. Things that look normal and innocent become dysfunctional and deadly in the artist’s hands,” says Mukesh Panika, director of the Religare Arts Initiative, and the driving force behind the exhibition.
“Domestic violence happens in many ways. Majority of the violence is against women and aggression towards kids. We wanted to capture it through visual arts because contemporary art is telling powerful stories about different aspects of human life. We want people to get affected by art,” Panika told Inditop.
Italian artist Betty Bee draws inspiration from memories of an unhappy childhood – the cruelty and neglect of her father combined with sexual abuse by her brother. It forced Betty to leave home for the streets of Naples as a teenager, where she ended up living with transvestites.
Bee’s art is a mix of “fantasies, desires, innocence, voyeurism and sexuality”.
In “Entita Riflessa” – a series of 15 small format paintings – the elephant, which is a symbol of divinity in many cultures, is reduced to a small puppet in the hands of a handler.
“One of the worst and most dangerous forms of psychological and physical abuse for a woman is being treated as someone’s puppet,” Bee says, explaining her art.
Her video, “Lionetti Luigi Classe”, is the graphic sequence of an old man undressing in the washroom. “It speaks of Betty’s abuse at the hands of the men in the family, especially her father,” Panika said.
Italian artist Giulia Caira’s work is rooted in the 1970s feminist movement when female artists used and abused their bodies in public performances.
She is the subject of her photographs and videos. In a four-part photograph in lambda print series, “Terapia Familiare”, the house is known as the universe of the drama of violence where the victim Caira screams and eventually breaks down.
“The Peacock Wallpaper” by Shelly Bahl is a period installation showing violence in the Indian milieu – which is often camouflaged from the world outside.
Bahl converts a small space in the gallery into a period bedroom of a princely family in the early 1900s to tell the story of a “hysteric Indian bride” and her husband Vikram, who refuses to acknowledge her insanity and confines her to the four walls of the room.
“I see the peacocks in the wallpaper crawling out and trying to move,” says the “invisible” woman whose bed faces the peacock wallpaper. She scribbles her diary of madness on the wallpaper. Her voice echoes around the sepia room of the “haunted house” narrating the story from a recorder.
A series of works by French American artist Ultra Violet – pupil, studio assistant and muse of Salvador Dali in the 1950s – shows how a gun and phallus merges to become one.
“Both phallus and weapons shoot,” says Violet of her feminist art.
“We are trying to bring every dimension of art together to drive home the message of domestic violence because we are a 360 degrees arts platform. On Wednesday, we will stage three performance items (skits) titled ‘Woh Bol Uthi’ by the Jan Natya Manch on gender abuse in the backdrop of two of Chintan Upadhyay’s works ‘Before She was Discovered -1 & II’ in dry pastel and acrylic colours on canvas,” Panika said.
