Chila Kumari Burman

Chila Kumari Burman

shakti, sexuality and bindi girls 

by Rina Arya

KT press, 2012

This project is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York

KT press publishes books and n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal to promote understanding of women artists and their work

Chila Kumari Burman: shakti, sexuality and bindi girls

by Rina Arya

Notice of Rights

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact [email protected]. The right of Rina Arya to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyrights, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

Copyright © 2012 by Rina Arya

All images copyright © to named artists, reproduced courtesy of artists.

ISBN: 13 digit 978-0-9536541-3-0

ISBN: 10 digit  0-9536541-3-3

Publisher: KT press, 38 Bellot Street, London, SE10 0AQ, UK

Website: http://www.ktpress.co.uk

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Front cover image: detail from Chila Kumari Burman Girl Masturbating (2011)

1. Artist's Monograph 2.Art after 1960 3. Feminist theory 4. Black and Asian Studies

I. Arya, Rina. II. title.  

Contents

Copyright

Preface

Introduction

Ice Cream works: 2006 - 2008

Burman at art school

Black art: an overview

What about the black sisters...?

New ethnicities (1990s)

Shakti

The sexual self

Self-Portrait: styling the self

Humour

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

About Chila Kumari Burman

List of illustrations

Preface

I first met Chila Kumari Burman in 2006 when our mutual friend Catherine Cummings invited her to give a talk at what was then Plymouth College of Art and Design. Having prior teaching commitments I was unable to attend but took away a couple of catalogues of her previous exhibitions and arranged to meet her at a later stage where we talked at length about our similar ethnic backgrounds. Being British-born and bred, South Asian (our families hail from different parts of Northern India) and second-generation, we shared a common understanding (or several common understandings) of the disparity between the values of our home culture, that is the Indian cultural values of our upbringing, and contemporary British society. We talked about the problems of fitting into different cultural environments and the importance of being accepted on our own terms. From our formal academic training we had inherited an understanding of normative European frameworks that underpin the curriculum, in both theory and practice. Having both studied Western art and its histories at UK universities, we also had in common an understanding of the relative invisibility of South Asian women in the art school setting both in social demographic terms of the student (and staff) body, and also symbolically with regard to the lack of visible representation of non-Western groups.

After our first meeting we continued to talk about the challenges that South Asian, particularly female artists, faced about making work on their own terms whilst strenuously staving off interpretations that sought to reduce their work to clichés and impulses to exoticize their work. Burman has always maintained that her work is about representing identity, where the former is something that is protean and never fixed. Her work is rich because of its strident aesthetic and also because of the ensuing intellectual debates that it provokes in those who engage with it. One of the most enticing aspects of Burman’s work is the mutable sense of self that it articulates, where as one looks repeatedly at each image in her work, new meanings and understandings emerge. She presents the elusiveness and evasiveness of personal identity that is always in a state of flux, that is contingent on its surroundings, and that is always beyond grasp. This quality points to the paradoxical nature of Burman’s art that is, on the one hand, so tangible, in terms of the forms, textures and what Meena Alexander describes as the ‘sonorous colours’ 1 that it presents, and on the other, is intangible and fleeting in its avoidance of totalising statements. Alexander’s synesthesic phrase captures Burman’s vivid use of saturated colour, which reflects the vibrancy of Indian culture. When I first saw Burman’s work I was reminded of the explosions of colour that occur during the Hindu festival of Holi, which marks the season of spring and where people throw coloured powders and water at each other. The power of her imagery has been widely recognized and has been used on the covers of multiple books from subjects about cultural identity, such as Roger Bromley’s Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions (2000) to Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999).

One of Burman’s key objectives is to make visible subjects that are often marginalized and silenced into the foreground and to give them a platform on which to take a stand. She uses the self – herself – as the basic unit of investigation into selfhood and the representation of South Asian identity. In one respect this is not an unusual strategy as many philosophical reflections on identity begin with the self but, having said that, it was an audacious move for her, as a South Asian woman, to use her own image and body as an epistemological tool and as a vehicle for her ideology. Certainly, within the domain of visual representation, there were few precedents for the display of the South Asian women in Britain as the unit of identity construction. By making herself seen, Burman was not only thrusting the image of the South Asian woman into the spotlight within British visual culture but was also unveiling herself as the author of this ideology.

Introduction

Chila Kumari Burman is a pioneering artist whose work is a perpetual engagement with articulating what it means and what it feels like to be a British South Asian woman in a global consumerist world. Her work is characterised by its vivid colours, an emphasis on layering, the use of found objects from her personal history and the persistent bold presence of her image, which is used as a tool of inquiry. Her continued focus is on the politics of representations of identity. In her representations, which are largely about female form and identity, she sought to firstly expose the injustice and oppression suffered by various minority communities and secondly to address this by constructing representations that give credence to their position as socio-political subjects by exercising the power of visual representation. Identification was translated into activism.

Chila Kumari Burman with her mother, father, uncle and two of her brothers outside their family home in Bootle and Chila Kumari Burman sitting between one of her brothers and her elder sister

Burman was born in Bootle, a working-class area of Liverpool. Her parents were Punjabi Hindus and moved to the UK in the 1950s following the partition of India in 1947.2 Burman hailed from a creative family; in addition to her father’s natural talent for performing magic, two of her brothers Ashok and Achar are visual artists (her late brother Ashan, who was more commonly known as ‘Majic’ was also an artist, and collaborated with Burman on a number of projects). However, she is the only one who had any formal training or qualifications in art, beginning her academic and artistic career at Southport College of Art and Design in 1975 where she did a Foundation Course in art. From there she moved on to Leeds Metropolitan University (formerly Leeds Polytechnic) where she was awarded a first class Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication Design and Printmaking. After completing her degree Burman went on to do a postgraduate course in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art in London, which she completed in 1982. She was one of very few visible minority ethnic female artists during the early the 1980s to study at art school, and her commitment to the politics of representations of identity is an ongoing theme in her work, which began whilst she was a student and is also central to her contemporary work.

Burman was also the first British Asian female artist to have a monograph written about her work – Chila Kumari Burman:Beyond Two Cultures (1995) by Lynda Nead.3 This very fact testifies to the significance and power of her art. Her work is a celebration of womanhood and offers a holistic picture of the complexities of any/all identity formations. She articulates the complex and conflicting feelings involved in what it means to be a second-generation British South Asian female artist who continues to operate in an art world in Britain where she is marginalised because of her ethnicity (and class) but who is now exhibiting in and across Asia, reforming ties with the emergent generation of Indian artists on the international stage.

Chila Kumari Burman Punjabi Rockers (2004-2012) mixed media, glitter, collage, bindis, gems, cibachrome and pigment. Print on canvas and Somerset Velvet paper. Individual works, sizes variable.

This book, which examines Burman’s work post-1995 and up to the present day, has several aims. It seeks to move beyond the model of ‘beyond two cultures’ that Nead speaks of but does not develop further. Nead is correct in that Burman does not position her presentations in an either Asian or British schema and instead explores the complexity of identity positions that are fluid, indeterminate and cannot be defined monolithically or dualistically with recourse to a particular cultural group. Burman visually articulates the theoretical notions of Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘new ethnicities’ 4 in which Hall destabilises and deconstructs the essentialised notion of blackness thus moving beyond conceptions of identity politics which had emerged in the 1970s. Burman transcribes this in her artwork by stressing difference and contingency, and by looking at other variables of identity such as religion and sexuality.

The most compelling aspect of Burman’s art is that she conjures up a comprehensive array of identities but without bringing about or necessitating closure. This is not necessarily a question of choice but corresponds to the fluid nature of identity, where we dip in and out of roles and projections of the self, sometimes knowingly, and at other times more subconsciously. By keeping the dialogue open, and by not exhausting any particular position, she is making a profound statement about personal identity in general, which cannot be pinned down or captured by a pat formula. Burman’s strategy is to release the self from the limitations of identity tags, and assert the possibility of occupying a proliferation of different positions, thereby releasing her from the burden of speaking for others or being trapped as representative of an ethnic group. There has been a tendency in identity politics to use the marginalized figure – the ‘visible minority ethnic’5 artist, for example – as the politically correct spokesperson for the group. This wrongly assumes complete identification and commitment to a cultural group. This reductive thinking, where one person’s insights and experiences are taken to be representative of the whole group elides the critical differences that exist between people. This tendency is damaging and is tantamount to racial and/or ethnic stereotyping. This is certainly not the intention of any artist who is motivated to talk about their experiences for several reasons, none of which are to reduce the richness and complexity of any one individual’s experience. Burman explored her identity in her work, amongst other things, in order to place the South Asian female subject at the centre of visual discourse, which she hoped would engender greater visibility. As an ardent feminist Burman releases her representations from the fetters of the male gaze and claims power and autonomy for herself. She explores herself as subject and by extension projects a wide range of representations with which other women (and men) may identify. As she places and presents herself in the frame, she urges others to follow in the discovery of their own identity and place in the world.

Another objective of this book is to situate Burman in the vivid context of the burgeoning black art scene of the 1980s in order to discuss her contribution. The more multicultural nature of the art world has meant that critics tend to be caught up in a politics of individualisation that, to greater or lesser extents, examines the individual in an atomistic way rather than situating them amongst others who shared political identifications and alignments. This is a strategy that Nead adopted in her monograph, where she focused on interpreting Burman individualistically and outside of her aesthetic or artistic milieu. This is compounded when the focus is on biography rather than the