Exhibition Review: Arpita Shah, Nalini, Street Level Photoworks

Nalini is a family portrait. In fact it is an exhibition full of portraits, including the artist Arpita Shah’s self-portrait as a white flower rising up from a pond with petals about to burst open. Nalini is the Sanskrit word for lotus, it is also the name of Shah’s maternal grand mother. The lotus and other flowers are used as symbolic motifs throughout the exhibition alluding to femininity and the cycle of life, death and rebirth. Nalini speaks of four generations of women who were all born in India, but who spent significant parts of their lives elsewhere.

Shah’s pastel infused photographs were made in Ahmedabad, Mehmdhabad, Mumbai, Mombassa, and Nairobi. The collection is enhanced by old black and white photographs plucked from her grand father’s attic. She also uses objects to enrich this story of family, time and migration. Those pastel shades of pink and blue and occasional greens and yellows are soft and gentle in the warm light of both India and Kenya. Gentle is a word that speaks about the work in more ways than the obvious. Its Latin etymology is rooted in the clan, or family, it’s Old French derivative in the notion of nobility. Shah’s family moved to Kenya in the late 1920s in order to establish a new business, the Krishna dairy depot in Nairobi. They left to return to India upon the outbreak of the Second World War. In an old photograph Nalini can be seen as a young girl stood next to her little brother amongst a large group of mainly African workers and a cascade of silver milk urns.

Once back in India Nalini longed for Nairobi, the place she continued to call home. The sense of displacement is palpable in one photograph in particular of an ageing Nalini looking out over the city of Ahmedabad from her family apartment. Displacement is a subject of the work. Shah herself was born in India but raised and educated between Saudi Arabia, England and Scotland. Together with her mother, she travelled to Kenya for the first time in order to research this project. There they tried to locate the site of the Krishna dairy on Canal Road. At first their efforts were in vain as the names of streets and roads had been changed since Kenya won freedom from British rule in 1963. Then, through a chance meeting with someone whose own ancestors had purchased the land, they managed to track it down. There is a lump of stone in a vitrine in the exhibition as proof of that successful quest, a piece of the wall where the dairy once stood. Photographs and stones and beads and hair and skin and flowers, these are the currency of familial ties that purchase a space in memory that mitigates against the disorienting effects of displacement and migration. Some of Shah’s earliest memories are of pastel coloured paper shapes dancing in the sky above Ahmedabad during the city’s great kite flying festival that welcomes the sun back after the passing of mid-winter. Kites fly free in the air but are always reassuringly anchored to the earth by a length of string. 

In the past, Shah’s work has featured more traditional portraits. Families and young women have been pictured frontally and in diffused light, in a manner evoking the conventions of portrait painting as much as photography. Nalini is therefore a departure for Shah. Her great grandmother’s sari is elegantly presented on a teal green plinth encased within a finely crafted glass cube. Thus, pride of place within the exhibition is given to a garment, a prized object that was worn by an ancestor whom Shah barely remembers. It stands in more potently for this first woman of the story than any of the photographs we see of her. Shah also photographs still lives intimately connected to her ancestors, her great grandmother’s passport, the braid of grey hair now shorn from her grandmother’s head following serious illness, both adorned lovingly with flowers. Photographs themselves become still lives, held in the hand, encircled with petals or stood in the sands of Mombassa beach. Through her photographs, and her treasured objects, (including old photographs), Shah makes manifest her own memories and in doing so creates new ones. Everything adds up to her deeply felt physical and emotional connection to the maternal line of her family. To simply picture the faces of her mother and grandmother would have been inadequate in conveying the depth of love that emanates from this collective body of work. 

As an exhibition Nalini asks different questions about home and migration and femininity but above all else it is a family portrait made with love and a deep sensitivity toward Shah’s maternal ancestors and the artefacts and symbols employed to tell her own and their story. There is no ending, happy or otherwise, but there is the promise of more to come. 


_________________________________________________

All images © Arpita Shah