Tejal Shah Pentimento

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KASHI ART GALLERY
A preview on Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 6.30 pm on Tejal Shah’s Pentimento.
In this multi-media exhibition, TEJAL SHAH invokes troubling visual epistemologies, propounded by the medical establishment in 19th century Europe. During an artist residency in Paris (2007), Shah discovered the archive of the Salpetrier hospital, which consists of photographs of hysterical women. In actuality, these images mapped hysteria on the woman’s body, emphasized its ‘feminine’ nature and purported to create knowledge about it.
Both fascinated and troubled by this archive, Shah began the series of photographic recreations presented here. In the video installation, 00:00:20:27, the body is not the disciplined body that must accurately and publicly project a condition; it is the body caught in duress, in privacy, and neither the doctor nor the viewer can impose control on it through the modalities of vision. Shah caps her solo by admirably capturing mental tensions in an abstract form in her kinetic sculpture, “When I am bored, all I do is make a red knot and look at it”.

Seen together, all the works critique the archive and offer alternate ways of thinking about mental health. The exhibition’s title, then, becomes a metaphor for the artist’s methodology. Pentimento is a term used for changes or adjustments made in a painting, which leave behind traces of figures or objects that have been painted over. Shah’s works too reveal traces of a buried history of disturbing iconographic practices, the historical designation of women as the primary ‘carriers’ of hysteria, and the violent treatment meted out to them.

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