Can the mind ever be free of fear? Fear is a key component in religion, law, family and kinship, gender relationships, marriage and inheritance customs, birth and death rituals, war and peace and so forth. Indeed, fear lurks around every human situation one can imagine, conspiring to ambush the grittiest, for who's immune to fears about their loved ones? So deeply embedded is fear in the collective unconscious that it resists exorcism, generates and thrives on stories that leave a wake of innuendoes, myths and recognizable patterns. And artist Amritah Sen knows that well, as her sensitive antennae are tuned to fears rational and imagined, confessed and concealed.
Indeed, the narrative of fear intrigues her deeply and turns her into a ravenous collector of both community and personal tales which, as a colourful raconteur, she tosses in a tangy dressing of school craft, children's books, poster art and comics, served up in The Fear Books and More, her recent solo show at Ganges Art Gallery. The tales come from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. But she also conveys concerns that inhabit the very air you breathe. When the references are as widely divergent as myths from the Mediterranean region to children's ageless hallucinations; as widely relevant as fears of loss and loneliness or the fear in women of assault, they tell you how universal this response is to human situations.
When Sen brings in, in her Fear Book 8, the myth of the incubus -the male demon that ravishes sleeping girls - she's tacitly yoking it to the very real reports of rape you hear every day. Interestingly, this myth has been in circulation in different forms, reveals a net search, since ancient times. The artist discovers its echo in the Sri Lankan story of Kalu Kumaraya or the Prince of Darkness. Such stories are part of Indian lore as well. For example, the folk tale on which the Girish Karnad play, Nagamandala, is based is one of them. Not less common are tales of female spirits: the succubus is reborn in Sri Lankan folk imagination as Mohini, the enticing apparition in white not unknown in Indian villages, no doubt reflecting the fears of domestic instability linked with unattached and adventurous women.
But you can't pooh-pooh the fragile state of mind of the elderly woman in Karachi when she reveals, in Book 10, that she feared her stories might be taken away from her. Would somebody steal them as their own? Or would she be compelled into silence by disowning them? Because one's stories are one's memories, one's roots, that would strip her of identity. Particularly if these stories are of epic suffering and displacement as suggested in her confusion as to which city in India or Pakistan she originally belonged to.
But why only epochal upheavals like Partition? Sen repeats the simple images of two hands with splayed fingers and screaming mouths in a way that locate both menacing aggression and victim vulnerability in the everyday. And if senseless phobias appear ridiculous - though they are stubbornly real to the sufferer - there's nothing ridiculous about the incendiary musings of a monstrous, spider-like eight-armed creature in Book 6 about loss, inadequacy, insecurity and a sense of being trapped in a life of no exits (picture). In another book, dragons replace snakes in the board game of Snakes and Ladders, alluding not only to childhood fantasies but also to the contingent see-saw of life itself because dizzying ascents - along chance ladders - sometimes predict headlong plunges. Sen's scattered lines are comments on contemporary life that range from the trenchant to the touching, which often merge.
While the theme of fear has a persistent hold on people's imagination, it's the artist's strategy of deadpan playfulness of treatment that lends her work its provocative edge. Provocative because fearful situations - that are essentially grim and dramatic, even melodramatic - are, in fact, spoofed with an ironic aloofness to turn down rather than stoke their emotional charge.
She thus opts for collages of peppy eclecticism with cutouts, speech bubbles, pop-up images, assorted lettering, texturing of the surface, and a wryly gauche style of painting - which brings to mind a contemporary's visual banter - in putting together her "books". Books of regular format and those with accordion folds to which separate flaps are added to aid unusual display of structure. Whatever paper is used, whether Fabriano or Indian handmade, its weathered tactility is accentuated with tears, layers and burns. What that gets you, in the end, are comic books, yes, but uneasily noir. And meant for adults.
