Kama, Quote -Unquote

Rajeshree Thakker's multimedia artwork Kama, Quote-Unquote is a complex one and layered literally with bits of acrylic, Orissa tadpatri, plastic wrappers from Flipkart.com set against a mostly graphite background. Most of the work is dominated by the figure of a man set within an alembic, a transparent glass vessel in which alchemical operations take place. As the psychologist Thomas Moore points out in The Soul of Sex, “(the vagina) was also the gate and doorway, the oven, the alchemical alembic or furnace...” The suggestion that the body is a tumultuous battle ground where the mixture of the physical and spiritual takes place is apparent. Rajeshree chooses to retell the incineration of Kamadeva as an alchemical process which we all undergo – the suggestion being that the Shiva within us burns away the Kama and thus needs to be reclaimed. The universality of this experience is underscored by quoting a scene from Shunga, erotic Japanese art depicting a couple making love, bracketed by strips of Orissa tadpatri using it as a framing device. Elsewhere she explores sexual impulses suggesting the attribution of an erotic charge to mundane objects in the online retail world thus hinting at the gratification of desire through means other than sexual. Finally she employs text stencilled all over the image which echoes and re-echoes like a mantra - the text is a variation of an axiom central to alchemy: As above, So below.

Excerpted from the catalogue raisonné of the exhibition : Kama, Interrupted (2015), curated by Apurva Kulkarni