Women & the various facets of life

Hyderabad-based artist Ramani Mylavarapu works in acrylics, mixed media, a few installations and also performance art highlight contemporary issues and social concerns.

Her subject is women and the various facets of their life and situations they face. As an artist she has social concern and feels bad about atrocities against women and highlights various problems faced by women and brings about awareness through her art.

She had now turned to another contemporary art form, photo performance and the present exhibition 'The Time is up' at Gallery 78 is an exhibition of her photo performances linked by issues of feminism.

This is an outcome of more than nine months of work- conceptualising, planning and execution; there are three distinct series, and all are bound by the common theme of women empowerment to mark the international women's day and all are photo performances.

About her first series Ramani says, "In my first series I have 12 western paintings, 'Pastiche' is deployed with a difference. 'Pastiche' is a work of visual art that imitates the style or character of the work of two or more artists and celebrates their work. However, here I used my body to replace the figures in the original works and also swapped figures from two distinct works of different genre altogether. My intrusion in these paintings is not masked. It is meant to disrupt the way the work is viewed. The disruption is to shock and make the viewer think. There is an urgency and transparency in the visual language, and it draws attention to women struggle, their problems and the awakening and assertion of their right."

'The Time is Up Series' of 12 western paintings, that include a number of other artworks that deconstruct famous paintings by male artists. Each of the artworks utilise the act of insertion to deconstruct the original artwork to make a political statement that supports the liberation of women in India today. I chose the works I deconstruct in this series." Ramani has chosen images with figures from farming reflecting her family heritage. She has selected figures she relates to as a wife, as a mother, as an employee, as a student, as a sexual being etc., and has handpicked figures that she connects to as a woman artist. Together Ramani's supersession of her assorted figures represents the artist's complex identity.

In the second series called 'Pancha Kanyas' Ramani draws on the rich Indian tradition and mythology to focus on the six women who defied the social norms in more than one way and yet were worshipped and even had a mantra dedicated to them. She says, "The 'Pancha Kanyas' refers to six women and in these works I played across the times and rather than project historical figures or imagine them as conditioned by our books or mythological films, drew the character, clothed them in modernity, highlighting the defining event and the state that expresses the character portrayed. So, one can see the saree, a long gown, props like chess pieces, glass bottles containing air and the figurative blood bath to dramatise the vow of Draupadi. I presented myself in different moods of these six kanyas."

The third series, called 'Real Heroes' is her tribute to the five social reformers of India and Andhra region of south India, who had all done pioneering works by various means to uplift the status of women. As in the first two series, Ramani attired and presented herself as those real heroes as well as the uplifted women paying tribute.

In the three series 'The Time is Up' the artist makes herself visible. The power of these works comes from the artist's embodiment as a performative gesture to rupture the hegemony with 'her story'.