“Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away - that's how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak - even just open her mouth - in public. A double distress, for even if she transgresses, her words fall almost always upon the deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks in the masculine.”
Hélène Cixous ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ (The Laugh of the Medusa) 1975. 1
I met with the Bangladesh artist Preema Nazia Andaleeb (aka Nazia Andaleeb Prima) at Liverpool Street rail station, London, in the December of 2022. We walked and talked about life, philosophy and the breadth of her art making. We settled in a venue in Finsbury Square, near to the Liverpool Street rail station, to talk more.
It was there over a luncheon of selective ‘small plates’ (appetisers) that the artist presented me with a copy of her voluminous book titled ‘Preema Donna: an infinite journey’ (Cosmos Books, Dhaka, 2019).
NB a ‘prima donna’ (in Italian) is literally the ‘first lady’, prima - first, donna - lady. The term originates from Italian opera during the sixteenth century and refers to an institution of strong women within opera’s culture. Donna can also mean queen. Preema Donna becomes a play on ‘Prima Donna’, Preema - woman - queen. The use of Italian for the title of her work is not simply a play on words, but an important link back into the Western history of art itself. Back to artists like Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) and paintings such as‘La Donna Velata’ (‘The woman with the veil’, 1515) That painting is one his most famous portraits, where he demonstrates his abilities in painting textures, using chiaroscuro, presenting us with the notion of the constantly sidelined, or ‘veiled’ woman, her mystery and beauty.
In the preface section ‘Limitless Journey of Possibility’ (p14) of her book ‘Preema Donna’ the artist mentions “Art is a question to me, not an answer. Hence, as an artist I am always alive, like art, travelling from soul to soul.”
For Preema Nazia Andaleeb there is no such notion as Leo Tolstoy’s ‘What is art’ (Russia 1897). All materials, and any material, may be conscripted to her purpose of art-making, including performance art, using her dancing and performance skills. For her, and art’s, purpose is to communicate the essence and urgency of communication, and in whichever way her intrinsic purpose demands. Notions of flatness vs dimensionality, width, height, length, breadth, time, material/medium become utilised in her works for, as Marshall McLuhan 2 and John Berger 3 intimated, often the medium becomes not just the conveyor of the message, but frequently the message itself.
Like many artists Preema Nazia Andaleeb does not limit herself to one singular mode of expression. Instead, she organises photographic elements, paints in oils and acrylics, creates with digital media, performs modern choreographic movements with intimations of the traditional Indian dances (such as the Tamil classical dance Bharatanatyam, she has studied), to illustrate body and gender politics and generally to aid greater knowledge of the plight of women in misogynistic relationships and cultures, utilising a vast array of mediums when and where she deems appropriate.
The Tate Gallery online reminds us that
“The use of mixed media began around 1912 with the cubist collages and constructions of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and has become widespread as artists developed increasingly open attitudes to the media of art. Essentially art can be made of anything or any combination of things.”4
In Preema Nazia Andaleeb’s use of non-traditional modes of art making, she has commonalities with 20th century Western Modernist avant-garde artists such as the adherents of Cubism, Dada, Surrealism and Fluxus movements. Artists like Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso, whom she favours (along with the Georgia O’Keeffe, and her ‘performative processes’ photographed by Alfred Stieglitz). Preema Nazia Andaleeb has similar knowledge of great Indian artists, like Jamini Roy (he who had developed a ‘modern’ Indian art by looking towards indigeneity in a ‘folk renaissance’); as well as the expressionistic boldness of the great polymath Rabindranath Tagore.
Within Preema Nazia Andaleeb’s book there are reminders of that indigeneity in Jamini Roy’s work in her paintings such as ‘Women of Abstraction 10’ (2018, p16), ‘Beyond Identity: The Sum of her Parts’ (2018, p27) and an earlier work ‘Haunted Existence’ (2014, p156). It’s the large almond shaped eyes. They are remnants of a Bengali folk tradition coupled with the darkened ferocity of Rabindranath Tagore’s paintings of women. Like Roy and Tagore (in her paintings of women) Preema Nazia Andaleeb situates herself within ‘Modern’ Indian, but more especially Bengali roots, and their modernist re-interpretation of folk art, rather than exhibiting any overt Western intimations.
Prima Donna she may be, but Preema Nazia Andaleeb does not (in the English vernacular) ’act out’. She ‘talks out’. She is a woman who firmly grasps the baton of female suppression and re-creates within the sphere of concepts concerning the subordination of women. In Preema Nazia Andaleeb’s work there are hints of Antonio Gramsci 5 and Gayatri Spivak 6. Notions of the ‘subaltern’. Preema Nazia Andaleeb subverts the traditional muted role of the mythic Radha (beloved of Krishna), from the ancient Hindu Radha/Krishna story of the humble gopi (milkmaid) who became the beloved of the god Krishna. Preema Nazia Andaleeb brings Radha into modernity.
Spivak argues that
“between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’"7
In her series of work, titled ‘Concept of Modern Radha’ (pages 234 to 245 in the book), Preema Nazia Andaleeb de-veils Radha, de-mystifies and dis-entangles her from subaltern entrapment. Radha is seen as woman.
Jessica Frazier suggests that
“In the theological narrative poem the Gitagovinda, Radha is a passionate woman who both becomes divine, and incorporates her divine lover and audience into her divinity. The narrative form of her iconography manifests the emotional reason of an embodied religious agency, and through the affectivity of the poem she is able to share this fluid subjectivity, manifesting a pluralistic form of monism that is only one of Hinduism’s many variations on a supposedly
“pantheistic” model. Patterns of subjection are traded for alternating dynamics of passionate commitment. In Indian culture Radha continues to serve as an exemplary model of female-neutral subjectivity for all persons—an active, non-substantial, shared, strong self that rationally embraces its (religious) passions.” 8
The next book chapter in ‘Preema Donna’ is, fittingly, ‘Cosmopolitan Women’, in which the artist makes good use of a variety of art-making techniques to present the diversity of women within the Asian diaspora, as ‘women of the world’. The painting ‘Cosmopolitan Women’ (p256, 2014) is, poignantly, a mixed media piece used as the front cover of the artist’s book ‘Preema Donna’, and it’s slip cover. We see oblique references to the fashion magazine ‘Cosmopolitan’, its Western style and glamour, with photographic cut-out images. These become contrasted with images of women with hijab (hair covering), and some niqab (a veil that covers the face, but leave the eye area uncovered) while others wear the burqa (a female full body covering), none of which are technically compulsory in Bangladesh.
There is the bleak contrast between what one woman might wear irrespective of religious affiliations, and the raiments available to some choosing to wear for religious reasons, willingly or unwillingly.
Unspoken are the words ‘slave to fashion’ and the anomaly of being free and yet a slave to fashion trends. However, the very real enslavement continues in Bangladesh’s sweatshops, where workers are paid a pittance to produce garments for brand named companies, to sell to followers of fashion. As East Bengal, the link to Western fashion and the dye colour indigo runs deeper into issues of Colonialism, the Raj, and indigo farmers’ riots (Neel Bidroho, 1859).
While there differences of opinion as to whether ‘Performance Art’ is Art, Preema Nazia Andaleeb has continued to engage in aspects of ‘performance, since young. The Tate Modern reminds us that
“…Jonah Westerman remarked ‘performance is not (and never was) a medium, not something that an artwork can be but rather a set of questions and concerns about how art relates to people and the wider social world”.10
Looking back into the history of Western Art, performance (in the visual arts) is often retrospectively connected to avant-garde affiliations such as the Italian ‘Futurist’ productions and various manifestations of ‘Dada’ cabarets of the 1910s. Later (1929) in the second Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton was, controversially, to write “The simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” 11
Preema Nazia Andaleeb, while provocative in her presentations and performances, shocks in ways that do not require the phallic presence of a gun. She uses presence of mind and the female body as seen from page 272 through to page 361 in her book, Preema Donna. There, she reveals that ‘woman’ does not now need to counter the “language only that which speaks in the masculine” to overcome notions of transgression and the fears of Hélène Cixous, and Gayatri Spivak’s concerns. Instead, she (Woman) becomes free.
References
- Cixous, Hélène’Le Rire de la Méduse’ (The Laugh of the Medusa) 1975
- McLuhan, Marshall, The Medium is the Message, 1964
- Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, 1972
- https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/mixed-media
- Mondal, Disha, The Forgotten Bengali Cubist Artist: Gaganendranath, Quest Journals Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Science Volume 9 ~ Issue 3 (2021)pp: ISSN37 (Online):23219467
- Gramsci, Antonio, Notes on Italian History in Prison Notebooks 1929 -1935
- (Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-313).
- ibid
- Frazier, Jessica. (2010). Becoming the Goddess: Female Subjectivity and the Passion of the Goddess Radha. 10.1007/978-1-4020-6833-1_13.
- https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/performance-art.
- Breton, Andre, Second Manifesto of Surrealism in Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, The University of Michigan Press, 1969, p125
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