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Mary Abowd, Editorial Assistant
Oct 28, 2019
This fall the Film/Video Studio is home to Indian filmmaker Natasha Mendonca and singer, songwriter, and actress Suman Sridhar—together known as Black Mamba—who arrived from Mumbai in September to work on Land of the Breasted Woman, a live cinema piece they’ll perform November 1 as part of Picture Lock.
Supported by a 2018–19 Artist Residency Award, the work explores India’s legacy of colonialism through the story of the legendary figure Nangeli, an early 19th-century peasant revered for her role in resisting British rule—particularly the so-called “breast tax,” which fined lower-caste women for covering their bare chests. To create the piece, Mendonca and Sridhar dove into the sounds, rituals, and stories of their country and uncovered photographs from European colonial archives that provide a view of conquest through the colonizer’s lens. During their two-month residency, they’ve been putting it all together in the studio. Below, they explain more about the piece.
Tell me more about Nangeli—what drew you to her story? We became interested in Nangeli after the Madras High Court removed her story from students’ textbooks in 2016, an erasure of the history of the Upper Cloth Mutiny / Channar Revolt, one of the earliest documented nationwide anti-caste rebellions that was sparked by her life and death. Examination of indigenous rights, gender, caste, and colonial oppression in India is the entry point for this live cinema performance. Photographs from the colonial archives reveal a Victorian morality in their gaze on female bodies. The bra and saree blouse are Victorian impositions on the Indian female body via taxation. Women who faced forced religious conversions by European missionaries were allowed to wear a blouse; upper caste women were allowed the privilege of wearing the upper cloth, while lower caste and indigenous women were required to pay a tax in order to cover their bodies. Nangeli as a freedom fighter fought against colonial, aristocratic, and upper caste violence which led to the breast tax being abolished.
According to popular accounts, Nangeli protested by cutting off her own breasts and handing them to the British on a plantain leaf, then bled to death—but you’re skeptical of that version of events? In our field research with traditional mourners in India, oral histories reveal that Nangeli was murdered by the European colonizers, the ruling Indian upper caste, and aristocracy of her time. This narrative became obfuscated with time. Land of the Breasted Woman is an ode to Nangeli’s life and sacrifice, a funeral lament in memory of her legacy.
How have you used your time in the Film/Video Studio to create this work? The film and video studio residency at the Wexner Center is a residency prize awarded by the 20th Contemporary Arts Festival Sesc_Videobrasil for our previous feature film collaboration Ajeeb Aashiq/Strange Love (2016). The residency lends itself as an ideal lab. Our interdisciplinary practice spans contexts as diverse as museums, arts, music, film festivals, and clubs, and the residency accommodates for hybrid forms and experimentation. Land of the Breasted Woman juxtaposes 16mm film, sound design, video, paintings, drawings, and live music. The residency allows us to engage in a nonlinear process wherein filmmaking, music-making, and performance are integrated.
You both come from different artistic disciplines. Tell me about how you work together. Multidisciplinary art practice is intrinsic to our backgrounds. The exciting thing about this project is the chance to explore mediums in order to bring diverse perspectives to the process since we are trained across art forms.
What can the audience expect to experience at this live cinema performance? Land of the Breasted Woman is a funeral lament performance for Nangeli aptly programmed by [Film/Video Studio Curator] Jennifer Lange to fall on the Day of the Dead/Dia de los Muertos on November 1. We invite audiences to arrive in the spirit of Halloween. The folk tradition of lament includes a trance of song and spoken word. In our contemporary rendition, moving and still images form the backdrop to the performance spanning genres of hip-hop, Indian and Western classical music, experimental soundscape, and field recordings. The performance of professional lament for an indigenous woman is a subversion of the folk tradition that is reserved to mourn the upper caste male deceased. Land of the Breasted Woman is a radical queer feminist interrogation of representation and history.
Images courtesy of the artists
