‘Why have you not outlined it perfectly?’
An innocuous, almost trivial question is what I found myself asking when I first came across Anikesa’s paintings. Wide-eyed, I stood transfixed in front of a towering cathedral of bright colours; her canvas was an altar of our quotidian reality where items like jeans, cutlery, potted plants, shopping bags, and boots were painted everywhere. Amusingly, I imagined an unkempt teenager’s ideal living space – overwhelmingly chaotic and bursting at the seams. However, this cornucopia was anything but repulsive. Anikesa’s busy visuality effortlessly pulled my attention, inching me closer to what could only be described as the metaphorical looking-glass, making the familiar world surreal. Slowly, I woke up to the realisation that I was playing a cat-and-mouse game with the painting: whenever I thought I recognised an object, it would confuse me with another, constantly blurring forms, intersecting lines, spilling colours. It was this confounding yet satisfying playfulness that allowed me a glimpse into her object-oriented universe. One question remained, nonetheless - ‘Why have you not outlined it perfectly?’
It is menacingly tempting to call Anikesa a ‘pop artist’ (and her eccentric visual language would certainly agree), but such a simplistic title would only be slightly passable. Her artworks are not merely sardonic bylines towards a critique of consumerism, but delicately meditate on our attachment with inanimate items. Anikesa’s two-dimensional surfaces mushroom into a festival of colours, visualising passive and disjointed mass-produced commodities into a sensorial experience of love and nostalgia. These are playful reminders of our childhood, adolescence, youth; a chocolate shared between lovers or letters exchanged over decades – her enrapturing images preserve such moments of tenderness. It is in the mischievous profundity of her hand that such seemingly impersonal objects become anxious protagonists, speaking to our worldly vulnerabilities. Despite their flatness, Anikesa's artworks manifest in us an unassailable depth of remembrance, reminiscence, and regret. I was slightly baffled therefore, that amidst such delicacy what pricked me was - ‘Why have you not outlined it perfectly?’
The whimsical, carpet-bombed-with-acrylic-paint reality of Anikesa's art is curiously devoid of any human figures – especially her own. The artist however, is deviously present in her objects, imbuing them with an ephemeral aura of memory and madness. A haunting descends over us with her confined, almost-claustrophobic scattering of items, tying us with the proverbial Gordian knot. In that confronting instant, we are forced to reckon with the elephant in the room before it vanishes – why do these objects mean so much to us? Anikesa, it is to be said, enjoys such a haunting. Her works stand at the very threshold where fine art becomes an active interrogator, a totem that bewilders as much as it excites. These are paintings that coax us to touch them; rugs that want us to walk over them; and sculptures that call us to sit on them. In many ways, I am reminded of Edwin Abbott's book Flatland, where two-dimensional shapes inhabit a universe teetering on the doorstep of what science fiction has teased us for centuries: an atemporal multi-dimensional reality where anything (and nothing) is possible. This is what Anikesa does best – creating an ‘aporia,’ a moment of doubt for our obsessive/possessive fascination with holding onto objects of triviality. Her artworks subvert our sentimental fetishisation towards mass-produced items, questioning our personal and cultural connections with them. There are no answers, yet; however, it is in her very visual medium that we find the message. And this mystifying subtlety is certainly not lost on her, for when I finally get to ask, ‘Why have you not outlined it perfectly?’ She responds,
‘Why, do I have to?’
text @Shankar Tripathi
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In Memory of Objects We Once Had
What happens to objects when we no longer need them?
A personal anecdote: I remember very clearly a toy that I was given at age three (maybe, four) - a set of building blocks. These blocks weren’t the branded Lego blocks, but a knockoff; much larger and clunkier. The set of blocks came in a purple box with a green lid, and wheels on the side. These blocks kept me engaged for hours on end, and well until I was into the third grade of school. And around that time, my parents had decided to shift houses so we could live closer to my school. I don’t recall the packing and shipping process too well. We settled into the new house and lived there for a few years until I changed schools. And after this gap of few years, after packing and shifting between a total of three houses, I suddenly remembered that box of building blocks. We looked for it across the house, in rooms, in cupboards, in cartons under the staircase, and the object seemed to have vanished. I doubt if i ever wanted to play with the blocks again, but I really began missing the set of blocks. I do think of them every now and then, even today. Big chunky blocks of yellow, red, green, and blue, in a purple box with a green lid and wheels.
How do our collections speak of us?
We accord value to objects on several levels - financial, societal, sentimental, and affective. And as such, value is very abstract and constantly changing; what is valuable for one at a point in time, may cease to be so as time progresses. Likewise, what is valuable for one may not be as valuable for another. The state of another might be aspirational for one, acting as a motivator to possess or achieve enough to reach that goal. So if a person is in a constant state of movement, climbing the need hierarchy, so is the fluctuation of the value of the objects they possess. The objects we once acquired would paint a picture of where we stood at that point in time - our possessions, past and present, are key to establishing our own archaeology.
A study of our lives based on what we collect, store, and discard, paints a picture of an ever-evolving sense of style, status, and aesthetics. The objects we bring into our lives fulfill different needs and wants. The innate need to adorn and elaborate is what sets our kind apart from other organisms in how our lives are conducted. From time to time the line between needs and wants is blurred; more and more objects and experiences find their way into our spaces, fulfilling an innate archival impulse to acquire, store, and preserve. It might be an exciting exercise to investigate people and draw out character sketches based on inventories of what they own and how they store it. This archaeological analysis of our own lives charts a parallel track of questioning our response to our environments.
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Forming a character sketch is a process exercised in many ways. The image one makes of another in their mind is partly dependent on how much the other impresses upon one, and partly based on how much one receives of the other. One makes these images, on the basis of the other’s physical appearance, actions, and what they build and collect around them. In each case, memory plays a vital role in adding form to the image. But in cases where memory fails, one turns to physical archives to corroborate. Mementos or detritus from times past furnish these personal archives. A first toy, a gift from an unfavoured relative that is still in gift wrap, a now-defunct DVD player lying in storage. Objects preserved in memory of. But then there comes a time when the object itself exists solely as a memory. Objects one knows only through the description. Think of the parable of the six blind men and the elephant. Each of the six blind men touching a different part of the elephant - one touching the elephant's belly assuming the animal to be like a wall, another feeling its tusk deciding that an elephant is shaped like a spear, another grabbing the ear stating the elephant it shaped like a large fan, and so on. Every perception is true in part. Memories of objects are so much like the blind men's perception of the elephant. Adjectives, embellishments, additions, exaggeration, erasures, and omissions to these memories create versions of versions of perception.
Why do we remember objects when they are gone?
Memories are ghosts in the way that they prevent a severance from the past. Objects live on as memories long after their utility has plateaued, diminished, and gone. Long after physical contact is lost, the only point of contact - one that over time shifts shape and form - is memory. The ghosts of people, places, and things as memories. This diptych, Ghost Story, is in one way Anikesa's own recollection of objects from her grandparents' homes, and for the viewer a character sketch of the people Anikesa reminisces about. Anikesa's painting of the ghosts of objects and memory becomes a step in creating an allegory of the cave. How do we see and perceive these objects and memories of the artist, and to what extent is the viewer's perception accurate? The thrill of being immersed into the artist’s world of memories of people and objects, of getting lost in a space that is so crowded with imagery, is not too different from entering a new city without a roadmap - while the colours and patterns overwhelm, the familiarity of certain signs and symbols compel one to relate. And it is in this relatability that the memories of the artist and the viewer begin to intersect.
Anikesa's memory of her grandparents' homes in being defined by the objects that existed (and some which may continue to exist), where they are placed, how they are cared for, and the significance they have in the homes' daily motions, presents a picture of relationships formed between people. These objects over time become totems of her bonds with her family. Ghost Story, can be seen as a spread from the artist's journal, a peek into the vacuous space of memory wherein objects and ghosts of objects become the means to travel in time and space.
text @Kadamboor Neeraj
