Text Courtesy: 5th edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale

Since 2016 Devi Seetharam has been preoccupied with the geometric formations of heterosexual male-bonding in social spaces, and the extent to which these performed masculinities further the entrenchment of patriarchy in her home state, Kerala. Over the years she has amassed a photographic archive of men among men in public spaces- from sites of religious worship to political rallies- clad in the traditional mundu (dhoti), white fabric lined with gold and wrapped around the waist. In her paintings she plays with the formations she finds in her own photographs, reorganising them to her whims, exerting agency over these contingent social gatherings to which women rarely have access. She endows a sense of timelessness to her treatment of this social phenomenon that is very common in Kerala by removing them from any contextual markers that might give clues to the place or time of their setting. Nevertheless, these everyday assertions by men through history, clad in their traditional attire- which is also a symbol of their given freedom and power- acquire the tenor of an urgent call for change in the sprawl of floral debris at their feet in Devi’s works. The seasons come and go and the clock in ticking, but the men are still here occupying public spaces non-inclusively, rehearsing the learned choreographies of masculinity entwined in the warp and weft of the mundu, and reinforcing them unquestioningly with motions that flick, twist and tuck in the ends of the garment. The symbolic power of this attire is also articulated in her compositions which situate the viewers’ gaze close to the ground with no choice but to glance upwards to the waists of her subjects. her process of painting is almost archeological as it involves lathering the canvas with layers and layers of paint before before peeling them away to reveal the bare canvas beneath in the form of a mundu. This gestures towards a historical constant and the absence of any revolutionary dialectic- a concept that is not familiar to the marxist vocabularies of Kerala politics- in the gendering of shared social and political spaces.