A Solo Exhibition by Mery Borah
Curated by Shaunak Mahbubani
VHC Pune, Aug - Oct 2023
Mery Borah's densely layer impasto canvasses hold a palimpsestic richness of emotional experiences. Presenting a body of work created over eight years for her first solo exhibition at Vida Heydari Contemporary, the artist channels the thoughts of Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, who asks, "We speak in tongues like the outcast and the insane...how dare we reveal the human flesh underneath." Here, subverting these patriarchal constraints, Borah deploys the raw power of abstract figuration to claim her own voice.
Raised in a small village in Eastern Assam, Borah came to Kolkata to pursue her MFA. The pressure of the big city is a prominent character in many of her paintings and drawings. The feeling of being subsumed by the crowd is recurrent, corporeally in the bustle of the streets, and also as a young artist navigating the opaque corridors of the art world. The artist recounts her process in creating these works as deeply intuitive, often without a detailed sketch or plan, directly channeling experiences such as repeated micro-aggressions in public spaces, or the struggle of finding safe housing. Affected by these everyday experiences, the figures break out of their two-dimensional plane, distorting, melding into one another, and losing discerning features, evocative of Karl Marx's ever pertinent writings on alienation in a capitalist society.
The artist is passionate about examining the factitious barrier between humans and nature. In a series of paintings reminiscent of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's fruit and floral faces, Borah constructs her painted bodies via an assembly of consumer objects, from packaged food to beauty products. One can read a presence of hope in the artist's mind as the series pivots to a damaged, yet uneasy calm within compositions of paint tubes, brushes, and colouring sticks.
Your cruelty is no match for my spirit.
Try to break me
and you will see
love that pours like blood from my wounds.
— Aija Mayrock
Borah's paintings underscore the value of creative acts in a fractured world, a process through which these memories are galvanized. In the encounter with these deeply vulnerable works, we too, are given the freedom to voice our own restrained emotions. Their presence goes beyond recounting a series of incidents, becoming charged emblems of creative alchemy, resilient acts of love.
