Kalapremi is a senior artist and arguably Nepal's foremost ceramicist. The show is significant not only because it brings us his recent experiments but also because it throws up a masculinist challenge in the face of a world fervently seeking gender justice.
And Kalapremi does so with rare aplomb.
Twenty exquisite ceramic bulls crafted through the under-glazed raku process hold the pride of place at the show—their pale gleaming surfaces are liberally inscribed with indigenous tattoo motifs that overlay the characteristic delicate fissures of raku.
It isn't surprising that in a show titled 'Masculism' Kalapremi has decided to present the figure of the bull, long venerated as a symbol of masculine strength and virility, apart from its obvious religious associations as Shiva's mount and mascot.
What comes as a surprise is how the artist turns this signifier of absolute male supremacy upon itself and presents it as a victim of social violence instead.
While 'the bull is neglected and confined' and ritually sacrificed at the alter, the cow is cared for and worshipped, he argues. With this inversion, Kalapremi tries to sensitize us to the exploitation and repression that males habitually undergo as they try and live up to every culture's masculinist expectations. For it is no secret that masculinity is as much a societal construct as femininity, that structures of domination and control claim its victims often equally among men and women.
The tattoos on the bulls' gleaming hide is a visual metaphor for the psychological torture that men undergo on a daily basis—sometimes within the family, often at work, and more often in the community as they struggle to live up to the socially imposed norms of an ideal, masculine figure. The violence thus wrought upon the male mind is no less decapitating than the repression suffered by women, and the artist likens him—'to a sacrificial goat/traumatize(d) ... till the fateful blow.'
Unfortunately, males have no popular or readily accessible 'ism' to fall back upon to counter this aggression.
The same thread of helpless suffering and repression runs through his series of 39 ceramic tiles that narrate instances and symbols of violence—harlequins, roosters, even Munch-ian faces distorted in frenzied screams are deftly painted in black across the fissured raku surfaces that double as canvases or sketchpads. Lock and key are recurrent motifs.
In Kalapremi's own words:
"Today's argument,
Women's (lock) appeal – against men (key)
Women-men (lock and key) together
In collusion to conquer over men
Those who advocate,
Do they keep with the truth?
Winning is the only absolute
In the chess of advocacy."
An evolving installation involving jamara growing on the surface of a lingam shaped from soil invites visitors to leave their personal keys around it as a kind of offering, almost—it simultaneously illustrates the necessity of earth (female) for the seed (male) to germinate while interrogating the redundancy or necessity of the masculinist keys that surround it. The 17 ceramic sculptures clustered thematically together and glazed an iridescent turquoise—the Blue Jewels—explore similar issues and concerns.
It is painful indeed that social and familial relations, be it man-woman, man-man or woman-woman, must inevitably boil down to power dynamics.
However, it is also exciting to see an artist tackle it from a divergent perspective. The world, more particularly South Asia, is waking up to the reality of gender justice. Kalapremi's new works forces the masculine identity into dialogue with feminist views while drawing the spotlight on the very many ignored or repressed instances of man to man masculinist violence. It reminds us that women are not the only victims of such aggression.
In a way, we should be grateful to Kalapremi for opening up a space for dialogue around the issues of male repression in our society when we're perhaps getting a little myopic with the feminist agenda and tend to forget that domination, power structures and repression ought to be the targets of our opposition and not a particular gender or sex.
An exciting show overall.
'Masculism' will be exhibited at SAG until March 21.
The writer is an Indian artist/writer/actor based in Kathmandu.
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