usurp gallery
Poulomi Desai
'From the Coffee Table to the Kit[s]chen'
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"....Poulomi Desai launches a triple assault: on the 'orientalism' of the way the West views Asian women; on the 'traditional' image some Asians are seduced into presenting of themselves; and on the way we are all tempted to play into the stereotype, with our desire to see 'nice Asian pictures'. Her irreverent aim is to shatter the contours of these fixed notions of sexual, national, cultural, personal, political and diasporic identities ...... Her work is resolutely hybridised.
The images of what she calls 'friends and foes alike', shot in London and Gujarat over a seven year period, look at first sight like portraits of glamourous young Asian women and respectable older ladies. In fact the younger 'women' are transvestite Shakti queens and both they and the older women - relatives and family friends - have semi-porno, centrefold images from Asian Babes or 'Bollywood' film stars nestling in the pupils of their eyes or hiding in the centres of their bindi marks. in Vimala and Suriya for example, Vimala has the beautiful, miniature profile of Suriya in her left eye; Shakuntala Devi, in Shakulntala Devi and Dimple 'wears' Dimple in her right. More shockingly, the more mature Induben (in Induben and Kia) has the bare-breasted, open-legged Kia secreted in the left eye; Aka (in Aka and Satinder) has the Satinder handling her bare breasts in the centre of the bindi; and (in Maba and Satinder), a naked 'babe' sits in the left eye of the old lady, into whose ear another woman - in a veritable symphony of spectacles - is suggestively whispering.
This work was partly inspired by a poem, 'A Breath of Lucifer', by the distinguished Indian writer R.K. Narayan. In it, he notices a smudge of oil on the lens of his spectacles, and then a blot within his eyes, which he cannot wipe away and which produces 'an unseemly mole' whenever he looks at a movie star's 'much prized face'. However as Poulomi Desai says, her work 'throws away the cleaner, the spectacles, the writer' and 'imposes a shiny new uncluttered plastic perfect view of the self and the other' which is beyond recuperation."
From Different - Professor Stuart Hall / Mark Sealy. Publishers : Phaidon Press 2001