Mattancherry Mix, 2018
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cultural mix of its inhabitants: Mattancherry, home to Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Jews,
and the neighbourhood in which Sosa Joseph lives and works.
What Are We?, the collective title of three large panoramic paintings made in 2012 would
appear to directly allude to this social cross section, its interrogatory postulate seeming to
touch upon a question of identity in that the vestimentary code of the female figures
thronging the picture plane in each of these works marks them out as belonging to the
Muslim community. But whose identity and in relation to whose alterity in a situation where
the adjacency and intermingling of people of different faiths is a matter of daily commerce in
the public space? When queried about the nature of the subject Joseph simply states that
the women shown milling about in the street live in the Muslim quarter of the town. Two of
the pictures depict them as going about their daily business, making their way in the
bedraggled ground, amidst the usual livestock that has a free run of the desultory place,
pausing to gossip or buy provisions even as they cradle an infant or tug at an unruly child … In
other words, the pedestrian commotion of street-life that Joseph herself confronts each
time she steps out of her studio, located as it is in an old, weather-beaten Dutch colonial
warehouse in the vicinity of the spice merchants and the historic synagogue in what is still
referred to as “Jew Town”. The air of the place is laced with the scent of spice and it is this
whiff that seems to have caught Salman Rushdie’s erotic fancy when he set a portentous
scene of seduction and ravishment in an entrepôt piled with jute sacks bursting with pepper
in his novel The Moor’s Last Sigh. The piquancy of Joseph’s paintings, needless to say, has
a different flavour.
In What Are We? (1), the women are lined up frontally as if they were posing for a
photograph, as the camera in the foreground – fixed on a tripod amidst the litter of all
manner of discarded things (umbrella, suitcase, slipper, rope, metal pipes, wooden poles) –
would appear to signal. But the position of the lens, however askew, is manifestly pointed
towards us, the viewers of the painting in which these figures have been immobilized in a
ceremonial of representation, as if we were the object of their collective gaze. The relation
between viewer and the viewed is thus slyly unsettled, suggesting an element of ruse in what
appears at first sight to be the artlessness of Joseph’s pictorial language. The seeming “faux
naif” style, however, is really a foil for a form of representational shorthand for treating each
element in the painting as if it were potentially a micro-vignette in a larger scheme, a tiny
incident whose apparent inconsequence is paradoxically what makes it momentarily and
locally momentous. Joseph’s pictures are aggregations of such offhand moments and
details depicted in a somewhat summary and succinct way, physiognomic traits reduced to a
caricatural tic or quirk registered by a pictorial handling that is appropriately notational in its
compact expressivity. The deadpan summation of these micro-episodes accentuates the
slightly edgy, almost mordant wit underlying her vision of the sheer randomness of the
quotidian drift, the purposiveness without purpose of the figures that people these
paintings. The horizontal span of the picture plane is thus entirely appropriate to the
inclusiveness of the social scene that Joseph wishes to encompass, including the snake
slithering in the foreground: painting in a panoramic format doesn’t need to resort to
anamorphism to register such details, unlike cinemascope, [which] “isn’t for human beings”,
as Fritz Lang famously quipped in a scene from Godard’s Contempt, “it’s for snakes and