As a performance based artist, Bhatt presents her work through video, photography and installation using her own self as a model and a frame of reference in each project. Bhatt's field of vision is very specifically located within the hurly-burly of India's cultural landscape at the outset of a new century. It is a moment where Indian society has shed its cloak of self-imposed shyness towards its achievements, and has re-emerged a brash, boastful society brimming with confidence: or at least that is the spin that the media has force fed us. It is the deconstruction of this hegemonic position that occupies much of Bhatt's work and drives her to create the personas that inhabit her tableaux. Since 2004 Bhatt has adopted characters as diverse as a male artist, Bharat Mata (Mother India), a collection of 16th Century porcelain dolls and, as seen in the present exhibition, a supermodel. In both the content of each of these projects as well as the context in which they are exhibited Bhatt, through the sharp lens of parody, continually refers back to a questioning of India's self-perception.
In early 2006 Bhatt chose to lampoon the issue of M.F.Husain’s depiction of Hindu deities. This she did by re-creating a cover page of Art India magazine and super-imposing on it an image of herself dressed as Bharat Mata leading a demonstration, presumably of anti-Husain protestors. In this provocative image, Bhatt trains her sights not only on to the forces of communalism but also India’s premier art journal for not taking on the subject with vigour within its pages. The investigation of both her protagonists and the media through which they are variously portrayed (or not as is the case of the Art India work) is an important sphere of interest to Bhatt.
Preceding the Art India work, Bhatt had already used parody to send up another bastion of contemporary Indian art: the phenomenon of the Bombay Boys. Bombay Boys was the name of a group exhibition held in Mumbai at the beginning of 2005 by Palette Gallery in Delhi. The name of the show was taken from the pre-existing collective noun that referred to a loose amalgamation of Mumbai based artists that drove the interest in contemporary Indian art from 2003 – 2005. In Bhatt’s work, the iconic photograph of the featured artists that was used for the show’s publicity is subverted so that Mansi includes herself (complete with facial hair and men’s clothes) as a fictional ‘Bombay Boy’. One must remember that the Bombay Boys came to epitomise the character of contemporary Indian artists at a particular moment. Never far from the society pages, selling (mainly) paintings for enormous amounts of money, and spending far more time on ill-conceived art camps than at their studios, galleries realised they could successfully promote artists through signature alone. Interestingly Bhatt’s impetus for the work was not solely focused on the plainly idiotic premise of the Bombay Boy fiction (very few of the artists were Mumbaikars in any case), but instead the desire to be included among this stellar group: as she declares in an interview -
“The picture is originally a promotional picture where all these heroes seem to be on some mission to be done in Delhi..…it looks like a bollywood film poster. I liked the temperature of this picture and immediately wanted to be with them.”
This honest declaration of a desire to be part her tableaux as well as a more obvious subversion of the moment is a factor that seems to be at play in much of Bhatt’s work. Indeed nowhere is this more clearly the case than in her most recent project, Nynan Kismarra: A Retrospective.
In Nynan Kismarra, Mansi’s subject is a fictional celebrity who, through a range of media, is shown from the peak of her career to the ignominy of being discovered to be bald, of assaulting a journalist who uncovers (literally) her secret, of being subsequently arrested and, ultimately, to her death (probably by her own hand). This whirlwind of activity is portrayed through the various media platforms at work in India today. We are shown Nynan portrayed as a lustrous character promoting her own perfume in the form of a billboard poster. We see Nynan at a gala function in New York through the society pages of a daily (in which she will later be re-represented in cartoon strips poking fun of her baldness). We are shown Nynan with slum kids celebrating her birthday with a cake cutting and a photo opportunity for the glossy magazines. Again the critical moment in the exhibition, when she is caught bald, is shown through the blurry and furtive gaze of the undercover camera. Even in death we see Nynan resplendent and re-haired, looking as if she expects to be used a promotional tool for an upcoming film (note the text – strictly a promotional object at the bottom of the coffin lid).
The presumed or actual interest in the lives of celebrities around the world has reached frightening proportions, and we are shown a glimpse of this through the fictional life of Nynan Kismarra. Interestingly, Bhatt has chosen here to represent a specifically Indian middle-class world view. The representation of celebrity-hood in Nynan is purely aspirational and one imagines a viewer of Nynan’s life who would both twinge with jealousy and lust at the strange perfumed world of Nynan and then feel an acute sense of schadenfreude accompanying her swift downfall. It is rare to be confronted with art in India today which so clearly asks the viewer to examine their own reactions to the mass of information which they are bombarded with every day, and it is an aspect of Bhatt’s practice that stands her apart from the majority of her peers.
Bhatt has brought a fresh vision to the contemporary Indian art landscape and, through the development of a strongly individual voice premised in parody, has been able to firmly establish herself as an artist of substance.
Mortimer Chatterjee