Monali Meher

'BUT I WAS NEVER A BRIDE'

Ex Mumbai artist now settled in Amsterdam - Visual arts trained from Mumbai. JJ college ... residency at the Reich Akademie .. Student of Marina Abramovic in some regards . . . Monali's route of performance was more of a body enactment towards an atmospheric domination of the space in contestation.

Hers was an absolutely a-political and fairly uncritical yet forceful tryst between the body and it's confining architectonics forcing the audiences re-navigation within a new zone free from inherent notional characteristics. Her use of video tools followed in the same vein. Any special material curation done (mostly of the basic organic sorts) was used as props in the performance. A ritualistic aura was predominant and carefully preserved in all of her Performative works.

Monali's session had the largest studio space. All of the peripheral elements of the performance (3 television monitors with looped videos of Monali using the banana as a make up item on the face.... < a throwback to her " body to beautiful " session > + Photo Posters of embroidery like mehendi work done earlier at the studios and photographed to be extracted in the negative) were created previously. The Central primal performance enacted the title "But I was never a Bride" with her seated by the central width of the room, Mehendi applied on her breasts and a mike in front of her at face level resting on a opposing dual curved horizontal Microphone stand fastened on the wall behind her. Text scripted in mehendi on the glass window was thrown into the rooms creating a myriad linear network of shadows by the exterior passage lights enacting a subliminal grotto-like vibe within.

_{Hemant Sreekumar}

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

A need to reshape belongings and change the nature of substance, a dialogue of matter and memory to create and animate, hybridization of different materials from various cultures or shaping the social, cultural elements of the immediate surroundings as a tool to reflect back as well as to start a new dialogue and to improve the ability to cope up or deal with the new surrounding in order to get back to my own self and awareness of senses, all these constitute the language of my work.

My performances/ installations are atmospheric and meant to be part of it and experience it. They are ritualistic and show the cyclical circles of destruction and renewal as well as formal and conceptual ideas and framework of personal references that inform the fragile divide between my life and art.

While struggling to get adjusted to the new surrounding which has been created and at the same time coming to a realization of the changing identity, specially in these short visits to my origins, encourages me to open myself up and use my body and spirit to communicate the personal memories of longing and belonging, while simultaneously commenting on female stereotyping within Indian society.

I use Mehendi (Henna) in an unconventional and individual ritualistic way to celebrate the body and its surrounding space as a reference to the marriage and its ceremonial aspect to bridge the past and present.
The videos are part of my work process here and the distorted sound of the harmonium brings back to me a nostalgia for certain spaces of particular times.

The performance is image based with the repetitive (Chanting) of pauses and stretches creating a certain anxiety and a developing curiosity about the end and the beginning!

The element of the past as a quantity of time is of significance. To be able to record and replay time frames and juxtapose real time with mediated time is a vital area of the work.