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WORKING WITH PAINTING, SEWING AND VARIOUS LENS-BASED MEDIA, RESHMA CHHIBA YIELDS AN AESTHETIC GRAMMAR THAT IS DISTINCTLY HER OWN AND COMFORTABLY INTER-DISCIPLINARY, WRITES ROBYN SASSEN

Sindoor Reshma Chhiba PreviousNext Sindoor, 2007/8 Coal, thread and kumkum powder on canvas 150 x 120cm

Reshma Chhiba is Art South Africa's Seventh Bright Young Thing for 2008

Red and black. Emerging from Reshma Chhiba's recent solo debut, Kali, held at Johannesburg's Art Exra in June, these two colours throbbed through the solar plexus, leaving a sense of bruise. Traditional images of the Hindu goddess Kali – also known as the Black goddess – reflect her skin as blue, offering a key into the possibility that the violence in Chhiba's exhibition may have been metaphorical. Showing intimacies of family culture in art contains knobbly pitfalls that rest somewhere between fact and belief, vulnerable to becoming defiled in the telling. Imbued in Chhiba's Hindu roots, Kali contained a universalism which drew emotional goosebumps.  
Sitting at her desk at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, her day job, Chhiba looks anything but intrepid investigator into the horrors and sexuality of Kali. Her hair, a gentle mass of kiss-curls, doesn't resonate with the goddess's unbridledness. Her candour in engaging with the work, however, does. "I'm still waiting for the priest to come with his trident to excommunicate me", she grins. "My family is not strictly orthodox – if they were, I probably would never have studied art – but the traditions from which they originate are."
Chhiba dedicated her debut exhibition to her maternal grandmother. "She was a woman of strength, who was married at the age of three. She was illiterate. She came to South Africa in her fifties. She died when I was 14; I was never able to converse with her. She spoke Gurajati. I am supposed to be a Gurajati-speaking girl, but I am not."
Chhiba speaks of many languages, including the physical. "I am a classical Indian dance teacher and have practiced Bharata Natyam, since I was eight."  An untitled video  from 2003 conflates the grammar of Indian classical dance with traditional sign language in accounting for violence on women. There is no sound – it's about inaccessibility. You have to read their bodies' grammar.  
Chhiba takes me down several paths to Kali: myths and legends reveal her as aggressive terrifying force, but also a symbolic one. "The outstretched tongue is a sign of embarrassment. She stands on Shiva, her consort, in error", Chhiba explains. "Kali is the goddess of time. The 55 skulls around her neck represent the sacred alphabets of Sanskrit; her many arms are about detachment. Shiva and Kali together represent life. Shiva's consciousness; Kali's energy."  
Tongues and hair, lotus flowers and gesture, her exhibition seems to speak of sexuality. "It does," Chhiba concurs, "but that's not all." The four reversed photographic portraits included on the show are a case in point. Reminiscent of the work of Finnish photographer Marjaana Kella, the images offer four life stages of a Hindu woman, using the hair as a signifier, and the codes of interpretation, from virginal child to married woman to widow to Kali herself; the images run rich with interpretative association. In truth the backs of the heads are as revealing as the faces, but quite frightening as they embody an unknown.
Chhiba creates portraits of her mother by twisting saris across painting stretchers. She represents parts of Kali in two-dimensional works, blending stitching with kum-kum powder and tumeric, in their spiritual and physical composition. "Kum-kum is used ritually. It symbolises feminine energy, menstrual blood. Tumeric is about memory and healing. My grandmother used to make medicine from it. I also use hand-crushed coal and incense ash. The pigments are all earth based. They relate to the mother, the life sustaining force." Inescapably, her work is physical to make. Sewing into massive canvases, Chhiba is not contributing to the feminine litany: she is performing a dance.
"At some point, what I am doing will be misunderstood. My people were sceptical about my doing this degree, but now, they hide their faces because – touch wood – I have achieved something". This she certainly has: the thrust of her show, the one that grabs and holds you, is the sophistication of its internal vision. Working with painting, sewing and various lens-based media, Chhiba yields an aesthetic grammar that is distinctly her own and comfortably inter-disciplinary.

Robyn Sassen is Arts Editor of the
SA Jewish Report

About Reshma Chhiba: Born in Johannesburg (1983), Chhiba holds a Bachelors degree in Fine Art from Wits University (2003). She has participated on numerous group exhibitions, including Women: Photography and New Media at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2006) and Impossible Monsters (2007) at Art Extra; she held her debut solo exhibition, titled Kali (2008), at the same venue. Joint winner of the Martiennsen Prize in 2003, she was selected by the Goethe Institute to train and work as an art mediator on Documenta12, in Kassel, Germany. She is currently completing her Masters degree in Fine Art at Wits.

Robyn Sassen

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ART SOUTH AFRICA V7.1

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