No gender bias here

Lovedeep Sidhu

When words fall short, a story should still be able to find its way to the audience. The world of art makes this process easier by allowing disjointed perspectives to fall together while leaving room for individual interpretation. For Bangalore-based artist Renuka Rajiv, 32, combining together bits and pieces is his favourite part of the work.

“I love to be a narrator,” he says. Rajiv’s solo art show titled The Future is Not My Gender has been on at New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery since last month. On display are textile and embroidery works, sculptures as well as 24 monotypes selected from a larger series of 300 prints. “The show is a collection of works created in the last two years. I wanted to make a more extensive body of textile works,” Rajiv explains, adding, “The title is personal. It is not a description of these works. I see it as an element of the body of work. Somewhere, it best describes my frustrations and feelings. So, I thought it would be apt because the works are anyway fragments of feelings.”

Born in Chennai, Rajiv is a recipient of the Emerging Artist Award 2016, an annual grant for promising young artists awarded by FICA in collaboration with Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council. As part of this honour, Rajiv undertook a 90-day residency at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts between September and December 2017. 

Since his return to India, he has engaged with different materials, including sculptures, textile works, paintings, drawings, zines, installations, animations and artist books. From amongst the different media, Rajiv’s interest lies in drawing. “The various media enable me to explore drawing in different ways. I would say that all my work is pretty connected in terms of expression (subject-matter wise).” As for his favourites, he finds himself returning to paper and fabric. With an interest in the hand-made, the fabric works are mostly made with old garments of family and friends. For Rajiv, the time-consuming and labour-intensive process of working with embroidery sits well with the spontaneity that represents drawing prints. “The embroideries, for example, develop over a long time and there are bits and pieces of different things that end up getting expressed. They don’t always necessarily connect,” he says.

While his labour of love touches upon topics of sexuality, gender, physicality, and notions of family and relationships, he describes it as a cathartic series. “My need for the visual arises from my need to communicate, but this need to communicate remains outside the realm of verbal languages. It is a visual world that is reluctant to be written about, yet intent to reach out. I am interested in the continuity and interplay between narrative and pattern,” he says.

How does art help his express himself better? “My expressions of sexuality and gender come from a more transgender/queer space. In work, this is a personal and sometimes internal side of my individual reality. At times, it might include feelings of frustration in terms of this reality not being readily acknowledged by most people. Other times, it can also be a more cheerful expression of my state of being,” he says.