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Of snakes, Alfred Hitchcock, #MeToo
Chances are, if Simryn Gill and Atul Dodiya’s shows had opened at any other time, their lines would never have crossed. But cross they did
There isn’t supposed to be a connection between Simryn Gill’s Naga Doodles series of prints (currently on display at Jhaveri Contemporary) and Atul Dodiya’s paintings of scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 film “Blackmail”. Gill lives in Port Dickson, Malaysia, while Atul Dodiya is from Ghatkopar, Mumbai.
The Naga Doodles are prints made directly from the body of dead snakes (Gill found a snake that had been run over and decided to bring its body into her studio, ink it using rollers to make prints. As you do. Because not even roadkill is safe from an artist). Mostly black and white, some of them have smudges of colour – yes, that rusty smear you see is indeed blood – and they’re powerful and mesmerising in their weirdness.
In the 36 paintings in Seven Minutes of Blackmail, Dodiya shows off his prodigious painting skills. The images he’s painted were scenes first photographed while “Blackmail” was playing on a television screen. These are rendered into little paintings that are faithful to the medium of celluloid but also enriched with painterly strokes that add texture, shadow and nuance to the moment.
Chances are, if Gill and Dodiya’s shows had opened at any other time, their lines would never have crossed. But cross they did in January 2019 when a woman stood before one of Dodiya’s paintings, in which a man is saying to a woman, “Besides, I always think a girl knows instinctively,” and muttered, “That little snake.”
In that moment, there was a cross connection between the snakes of Naga Doodles and almost-rapist in Dodiya’s paintings. Suddenly, the similarities between the two showed up. Both sets of works display rigorous attention to detail and an almost violent obsession. Gill made 70 Naga Doodles in two months while Dodiya’s 36 paintings are meticulous recreations of an attempted rape and its consequences. Dodiya shows ‘the snake’ in action as a predatory male; Gill remembers the reptile that has often been interpreted as a phallic symbol, as roadkill and transforms it into an abstract. While the “Blackmail”-inspired paintings urge you to see the woman’s vulnerability, Gill’s Naga Doodles transforms the snakes that inspire fear when alive into melancholic, broken creatures in this artistic afterlife. It’s tempting to imagine the luminous Alice White of “Blackmail” going on to become a celebrated artist who collects and make prints of 70 dead snakes in two months. Never doubt the cathartic power of art.
Hitchcock’s “Blackmail” is about how Alice White is blackmailed after she kills a man who tried to rape her. Dodiya’s paintings are particularly sensitive to Alice, who can’t bring herself to tell anyone what drove her to murder. Her major problem is one that countless #MeToo survivors have – there are no witnesses. In “Seven Minutes to Blackmail”, Dodiya attempts to solve that problem by installing mirrors above some of the paintings. They’re tilted at an angle that leads to light reflecting off their surface and casting a rectangular panel on the floor. Stand in that panel of light and you’re close enough to become part of the frame and a witness — you see Alice running away, you hear her protesting “Let me go!”, you see her painting over her name (in an effort to remove signs that she was at the murder scene).
It’s all sorts of poetic irony that Gill’s show and Seven Minutes of Blackmail have opened just when a fresh set of #MeToo allegations have surfaced, this time against director Raju Hirani who is accused of sexual abuse by a colleague.
The woman who has made the accusation didn’t come forward immediately after it happened in April 2018. She has said that she kept quiet because she needed the job and her father was suffering from a terminal illness. After her father passed away, the woman found the courage to speak up and report Hirani in November 2018. Hirani has denied the allegations and said he is open to being investigated by an independent body. Those who believe Hirani have said the accusations are “malicious and defamatory”. Those who can’t decide which side to believe are asking for evidence. As Dodiya’s paintings show, sometimes the evidence lies in being able to imagine the scene.
