Mrinalini Mukherjee: Hemp sculptures

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1:13The first work that we're encountering here in the gallery is an incredible work. One of her most monumental hemp sculptures. What she's really become known for in the international art world.

1:29She takes really classic themes and is able to blow up ideas do it in a voice which is totally radical and contemporary using materials which are off the air

1:44There's a kind of mysticism they almost look like deities or mythological creatures artist and sculptor munalani mukhaji has helped to redefine south asian art combining traditional techniques with modernist ideas at a time when political identity was shifting in post-colonial india her circle of friends family and teachers were all exploring similar themes which are now featured in a major exhibition. So how are these works of art, some made of natural fibres, transported across continents? And what does this group of artists have in common? I'm Sheetal Parma, and you're listening to the documentary in the studio, taking a deep dive into the creative process of artists.

2:39I'm Namana Hoja and I'm an art historian. I put Muralini in a very long and interesting history of craftsmanship and high excellence and modernism. So she forms a kind of a deep anchor for the exhibition. And all around are these artists who were working at the same time in India and many of whom had been educated by her parents. and so it's delightful to see these networks of the art schools and family networks and also student-teacher relationships and how you form a kind of a kindred group of artists who are friends, almost like sort of a gang of siblings that were working at the same time and each of them develops their own individuality.

3:31They may be cut from the same cloth at college but they've each turned into different voices. They're like a family. Like a family. Yeah, but they're all very individual. That's true. That's a good way to put it. Born to artist parents just after India gained independence following two centuries of British colonial rule, Munalini Mukherjee died in 2015, aged 65. But her influence continues. She's best known for using traditional natural materials to create large, dramatic sculptures, The exhibition also features her line drawings, paintings and ceramics. I am Tarani Malik. I'm the curator of A Story of South Asian Art, Rinalini Mukherjee and her circle.

4:17The Royal Academy of Arts is in Piccadilly, a bright and bustling part of central London filled with high-end designer stores. In stark contrast, there's subdued lighting and calming hues in the galleries. It's a cosy and inviting space. Your eyes are immediately drawn to a huge sculpture made of earthy-toned fabric. The knots and tassels create the impression of a human figure. It's made of plant fibres, similar to linen, which is spun into yarn for knitting and knotting. It's strong, quite stiff, dyed in warm reds and browns. These extraordinarily intricate and deeply impactful, rich hemp sculptures, which really show her absolute mastery of the textile medium, using a hemp and jute kind of fibrous material, which is very kind of typical, not just of South Asia, but across much of the global South.

5:18I want to get a closer look at the biggest of these sculptures. It's called Bakshi. The centrepiece of the exhibition, well, it grabs your attention as soon as you walk in, is pakshi. It's a structure that, if you saw it in a horror movie, you'd be absolutely petrified. But if you see it in daylight, you can see the warmth within it, and that is from the material that's used. It's a hemp structure, but quite free-flowing. And actually, to me, when I first saw it, quite intimidating. And then when you look at it again, there are lots of curving features within the structure, within the sculpture, that almost show a femininity, but an imposing femininity, evoking power, strength.

6:08And the ruffles throughout the length and width show an element of softness, I think. Who knew knots could be so interesting? Knottling is the perfect word. What these works are is an absolute feat in kind of structural engineering. It's robust, it's powerful, it's impactful, but it's still got a softness to it. It's still got a, and you know, forgive me for using kind of binaries here, but it's got a femininity to it as well, which is really, really interesting. They're very tactile pieces. Some of the influences in this kind of knotting technique are kind of directly from the time that Rinalini spent learning from local tribespeople in Gujarat when she was a student there.

6:50And this was very much under the influence of her teacher at the time, K.G. Subramaniam. But she uses different Arabic knotting techniques, different techniques which are also very indigenous to India. But what's so extraordinary about these pieces is there's no structural support. It's the actual intuitive hand knotting process, which is what creates these undulating, incredibly complex forms. In many ways there is no other sculptor like her. This was all done by hand with her and one other assistant who was a local tribesperson. Murnanani's parents met at the renowned art college in Shantiniketan in West Bengal, established by the artist, poet and social reformer Rabindranath Dagor.

7:32He was the first Asian and non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. At a time when Indian art was influenced by Western cubism and African and Chinese techniques, Rinaldi went to the Western state of Gujarat and the prestigious Art College in Baroda. Her teacher there, the artist K.G. Subramaniam, was pivotal to creating new post-colonial identities, which fused tradition and contemporary ideas. Here's Tarini Malik. We are standing in galleries which include painting, which include watercolours, prints, etchings, ceramics, bronzes, suspended paintings. This is a group exhibition.

8:18It's seven artists tracing a century. Our kind of motivations for doing this was just in our small way to show the breadth and the diversity of Indian art and also these beautiful links between the different mediums, how artists approach their chosen medium as well. We had the privilege of being able to spend time in India, meeting people, getting to know the ecosystem. And it really was a collaborative effort of hands, seen and unseen, that allowed for this exhibition to happen. We discovered a lot of things through conversation. You know, we'd arrive in one place in Calcutta and then we'd be sent off to another place at somebody's house to find another work.

8:56And I think, you know, our long list of works was almost 400 before we got down to where we got down to. So, you know, this exhibition could be 5 ,000 times in size and we'd be delighted. But yeah, it was a lot of labour, but a lot of labour that was worth it. A key work of one of those artists, Nilima Shaikh, is suspended from the ceiling. Nilima was a very, very close friend and peer of Rinalini Mukherjee, an extraordinary artist who in many ways can be considered as a living master. She made a work which was commissioned for the first Johannesburg Biennial after the fall of the apartheid in South Africa, which are these beautiful five double-sided suspended paintings which are almost three metres long in height.

9:46As you can see, this is a piece that you also are supposed to experience in the round song space. These incredible depictions of the Indian landscape with these small vignettes which bring together Indian art history, mythology, the folkloric, geopolitics. To be able to reunite this work here in London for the first time in 30 years, you know, was no small feat. Nilima's paintings are very theatrical, and actually she was someone who was very influenced by Indian modernist theatre at the time. You can also very much see the influence of East Asia in these works. So a lot of these artists at the time, including Rinaldi's parents, Benoth Bahari Mukherjee and Lila Mukherjee, as well as their student and her teacher, Keiji Subramaniam, spent time in China and Japan.

10:35You know, the imagery is so beautiful. You know, it's intricate. There's an incredible use of color, abstraction, figuration. They're quite dreamlike. They're very surreal. And you can very much see the influence of Renaissance painting. Nilima Sheikh cites Jotto as an example. It's a huge influence of hers. But also miniature painting from India. And what was so wonderful about the experience of installing it here in the galleries is that Nilima said, you know, whichever narrative you want to build, there's no defined order.

11:09They are absolutely dreamlike. That's the perfect word to use. I quite often describe the detail in Nilima's work as vignettes. So what they are is there's a strong element of representation of the landscape, of these undulating curves. Again, you see these undulating curves in Rinalini's own work as well. Trees, botany, animals, hills, rivers, clouds, all of these aspects come together in these kind of hybrid surreal compositions. And then you also see these small kind of figurative scenes. This side in particular is called encampment. And, you know, Nilima is very interested as an artist who has lived through a very shifting geopolitical terrain in India, as an artist who has advocated a lot for rights of people in Kashmir, as an example, thinks about this idea of occupation and the land and migration.

12:05So a lot of the figures that you see in these scroll paintings are figures in movement or in transit, up in the sky, in the water, in the fields. I quite often get asked about the show, is this a show about colonialism? I mean, of course it is, just simply because we're looking at the breadth of Indian history over a century. And having this work, which was made for South Africa at a greatly historic moment, I think also resonates with this idea in terms of connections across the global south, and South Asia as not this kind of isolated entity that is the subcontinent, but actually these kind of threads and traces between different cultures and our shared humanity.

12:54There's a beautiful sense of movement which is also echoed in how you experience the work. The works are suspended from a very, very thin, light wire from the RA's very high ceilings. And so what you get, you know, as you move, it creates a kind of breeze or a wind, and that creates a slight movement in the sculptures. It's quite cinematic, actually, the experience of seeing these works.

13:24One of Nilima Sheikh's teachers at Baroda's famous art college was Keiji Subramaniam. Having studied at Shantini Ketan, where the Indian modernist movement had begun at the start of the 20th century, he continued its evolution in Baroda, where Nilima still lives. Subramaniam came from Shantiniketan, which had another kind of relationship with Indian culture. It's called Bengal Renaissance. Whereas when he came here, he came on a modernist ticket. He wanted to develop a modernist language, which was taken from Shantiniketan, but developing something. So that, in some sense, was also the kind of nucleus of what developed at Barola.

14:11It was not just about a general reverence for tradition, but an investigation and an inquiry into artists. It's an education. It was a process of learning. Yes, pedagogy was very much a part of it. And when you see your work here, together with the other collections, how does that make you feel? It's very gratifying. It's very gratifying. When Tarini started working on this project, I was wondering what work she would pick up of mine. And it's interesting that she sort of honed in on works that were my early attempts at working on large-scale scrolls, which are painted on both sides rather than just on the walls.

15:00People who visit this exhibition, what do you want them to take away with them about the artists? Each of the artists individually are representing a lot. I'm not talking about myself, but even my husband, I would include in that, has their own very special, iconic presence in modern Indian art history.

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17:02You're listening to The Documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service about Indian artist Munalini Mukherjee and her circle. I work with the curators on installing the exhibition, the transport, insurance and bringing the works into our galleries. That's Candy Stobbs, one of the exhibition managers and she's taking me to where artworks arrive at the Academy and are unloaded from the back of huge trucks. We will bring the crate which for this particular work was an exceptionally long and wide crate and due to the width of the crate we couldn't get it into our lift to go up to where our exhibition is on display.

17:47so we unpacked the work here in the art handling corridor and our art handlers and the textile conservator spent a lot of time just checking how the work was packed in the crate and then transporting it up to the exhibition area. Can you tell us how Bakshi was packed exactly? Because it's a natural fibre, it's a natural substance so you have to be a lot more careful with it because it's coming a great distance as well. Yes, it had been very carefully packed. It had a lot of tissue, which would have been inserted into some of the soft areas. Some of Munlani's works are transported upright, whereas Pakshi could travel lying down.

18:32And then are there considerations for how the lighting would work and whether that would affect the actual fibres? Absolutely. I think because hemp is a natural fibre and three of the works we're showing are dyed, so having too much light can affect the dye. That certainly impacts on the lighting within the actual exhibition, doesn't it? Exactly. So we have very low lighting throughout the show anyway, but we've kept the lighting at around 50 lux, so the dye isn't affected by any exposure to bright light. And I've got here some instructions that you've given to me, which come from the original archive, written by Murnalani Mukherjee and, well, her team.

19:16Murnalani began to develop these instructions for packing and installing her works, which are handwritten. It says here, point 10, mould the sculpture into shape with hands and adjust the fibres to maintain the shape and the dimensions as in the photograph, which is fascinating. Which is really interesting and we were able to do that here with our textile conservator. We also noticed that some of the works, the dimensions over the years have changed. And also just one of the final points here that Rinaldi and her husband wrote was while on display, the sculpture is to be periodically vacuumed.

19:51Yes, very important. Once the larger pieces like Bakshi are in place, curator Tarini Malik and her team plan the layout for the rest of the paintings, murals and sculptures. so that visitors can understand the stories of connection between the artworks and a sense of time and place. We began the install as different works were arriving from across the UK, from all around India, from different parts of Europe. With a paper hang, we create these templates of each of the works in the show, which are to scale, with images. And then we play around the space and we work with our architect, our lighting designers and our technicians and our conservators and all the dozens of incredible hands that go into making a show.

20:36So some of the spaces we've left on the wall are for text, for interpretation, and that's why we're leaving that paperwork that you see in front of you as a paperwork for now, because tomorrow we're putting the text up in the gallery. So just to make sure that I've got the heights completely right, because we have so many works in the show, and these are complicated narratives to try and make sense of for an audience that might not be so experienced with Indian art history or have encountered these works, that's the idea. We want this show to be something that touches you, that resonates with you no matter where you're from.

21:11So throughout Murnali's career, she experimented and used lots of different materials and you will see that at this exhibition. I'm currently standing in front of one of her later pieces. quite an imposing structure, probably taller than me, quite narrow. Imagine a Christmas tree in somebody's living room in the corner and imagine that adorned by bronze ornaments. And it's meant to evoke lots of different feelings, I think. Life wrapped around a tree, making one life together. I know that looking at it, it can mean so many different things to so many different people. It's opening night and I'm standing under the song space scrolls painted by Nilima Shaikh as they move gently above our heads.

22:04I think it's quite wonderful the way this exhibition is being conceived to have one artist at the centre of it and then give a context. And the context in this case being quite remarkable was both her parents were such wonderful artists and then she also had the opportunity to have mentors who were very important artists in their own way and in their own area. I think that the way that it has been pieced together, it's been very thoughtful. It is weaving together of a narrative about not just Milena Ali Nibacham, Baroda and Shantini Ketal. take one piece of work from Rinaldi for example that you feel an affinity with and what do you think the essence of that storytelling is within that piece of work?

23:01I would say that storytelling is in some ways not the right word I think she was looking to endow her work with some sense of wonder and perhaps especially in her hemp work with a sense of awe associated with the sacred but secularized maybe that is something that came partly from her love of the iconic in Indian art or from folk and tribal cultures as well I once was exhibiting with her somewhere and she had arranged her hemp sculpture and I said maybe it should be aligned in a slightly different way and she said yes, we could just move it a little this way. She said you go and do it. I said I don't want to touch it now as though she had invested it with the sacred.

24:05What does that say about your relationship together? No, that was, we were friends from the time that she came to study in Barodha. I was a little older, so she came straight raw from school, comparatively protected life. So it was very nice for me to be able to see the way that she burgeoned out in this freedom she got in the art school. And I mean, we were friends, siblings, I would say, in some ways. I asked Naman Ahuja what he thought of this exhibition compared to his own in New Delhi. When I showed her work, I chose to put it in the middle of an entire room of classical Indian sculpture and ancient sculptures and I had this one booming voice of the contemporary in the middle of it.

24:56But here the spirit and the narrative of the show is totally different. It's about her within her peers. I like the curation and the labels because I think it states certain things that the public will find approachable and I think that's important. What's also really interesting is to see how much their teachers had travelled all over the world and how they were so inspired by East Asia and by European art and so many of the artists in this exhibition had been exhibiting during their careers in South America and in Europe and had come and done residencies in England and had worked in England and then had gone back to India.

25:37So I think there is a certain story of the kind of globalisation that was there in the latter half of the 20th century. You see that in all their works because they're perfectly international Indian artists. Also at the exhibition was producer and DJ Ritu. I feel quite emotional actually because firstly it's very rare that we see the work of South Asian artists at major institutions, particularly somewhere like the Royal Academy. when I was at art school we in art history lessons we weren't taught anything whatsoever about non-white artists absolutely nothing and we were not encouraged in any way shape or form to to make any art or paintings or sculptures that were to do with our heritage and our history In fact, in my year group, there was a woman of African descent on my course, and she was marked down by the tutors for making art that had African references.

26:49So, yeah, change is slow. And I think this is why, on so many different levels, an exhibition like this has a lot of meaning. and while visitors will take away their own interpretations and meaning from the exhibition there will come a time when the artworks have to be packed away again ready for their next journey exhibition manager candy stops will make sure they get to their next temporary home safely we will be de-installing the works again with our textile conservator and our art handlers and we will prepare, as we did with the works coming in, a condition report and we will be comparing how the work was when it came in with how it was at the end of the exhibition and just to obviously check that there's been no material change.

27:38And would that happen up in the gallery or would that happen when you bring the piece of art back down to the corridor? That will happen in the galleries and then we will bring it down again to the art handling corridor for packing and creating. And logistically then, the work and the experience that you've had then goes on to other galleries. Yes. And anything that you've noticed in terms of changes or lessons learned. Exactly. We will share all of that information because anyone can see this when they have a close look at the hemp, that there are little frayed sections, which is just the nature of the material because it is always changing.

28:18and hemp does kind of fray. So there are little details like that which we will share with the next venue.