Lala Rukh's intertextual frame

embodiment of 'felt body' against Cartesian emotion-reason dyad

The recent sculptures of Lala Rukh Selim unleash  a strong visual-conceptual force. Structured through an eroctics of expression which is devoid of desire, they stand for self-generative mode of expressivity while  encaging multiple referential values.  In each work, She, enmeshes a series of techniques of representation creating a condition of 'being' rather than addressing a vision of being having a fixed  itinerary, using both found and constructed objects. The very nature of sculpture is to construct three-dimensionality, and since that three-dimensionality occupies a space within a given spatial matrix, the process may well be understood in relation to a space-within-a-space framework. As one encounters her intertexts at a recently held group exhibition, one realizes that a labyrinth is produced out of the interplay between the sculptures framed around a multi-layerd narrative and the viewer's perception of figural and spatial representation/presentaion of objects.

The recent sculptures of Lala Rukh Selim unleash  a strong visual-conceptual force. Structured through an eroctics of expression which is devoid of desire, they stand for self-generative mode of expressivity while  encaging multiple referential values.  In each work, She, enmeshes a series of techniques of representation creating a condition of 'being' rather than addressing a vision of being having a fixed  itinerary, using both found and constructed objects. The very nature of sculpture is to construct three-dimensionality, and since that three-dimensionality occupies a space within a given spatial matrix, the process may well be understood in relation to a space-within-a-space framework. As one encounters her intertexts at a recently held group exhibition, one realizes that a labyrinth is produced out of the interplay between the sculptures framed around a multi-layerd narrative and the viewer's perception of figural and spatial representation/presentaion of objects.
In all five of her works, figure and space stand in for each other and vice-versa. Every moment that is born out of this network of spaces is unique. In this sculpture-centric narrative, that is an outcome of a spatiotemporal performative process, where knowing/understating is not essential. The primary issue is experience/sensation, whereby reality is redefined. Lala Rukh's sculptures expound sensuousness as reality, and through that an unconscious reaction against rational epistemic values is underlined. So these sculptures perform in direct opposition to Descartes' Cogito principle.
Memory plays a role of a catalyst in the creation of the performance, hybrid interactions and actions through which the artist has arrived at each of her multiform as she  prioritizes the process of 'becoming' through the formation of 'being', which constitutes the final display. She toggles between memory and reality, and this memory is the that of the body connected  to experiantiality central to existence. And this body, a sensitized and politicized through socio-historical means, is an intermediary entity between the 'legal self' and the 'primordial self'. It can best be described as a 'felt body  ... a conjunction of the social and personal. '

The Cartesian divide between reason and emotion vanishes here. Lala Rukh combines a number of narratives constructed through the use of objects – both traditional and of daily use. Sourced from her own life-experience, expending the entire spread of the social and the personal, these objects are created through a performative engagement of the artist's own body/self, apparently leading to a third body, the felt body.  

This experiantiality which is alluded to here cannot be translated as memory stored into the body; it is also the memory of the action and reaction of the body while it encounters these objects of traditional and everyday value. In this case 'body as a site for the expression of social personhood or individuality' (Andrew Strathern, Body Thoughts) is extended to the body of the artwork. Sculptor, teacher Lala Rukh frames this in her own words, 'I am attracted by the aesthetics of daily life and seek inspiration from both ancient and living traditions.' This 'inbetweenness' entrenches her works within the shared aesthetics of society at large. And it is precisely for this reason that a cultural response is elicited towards her sculptures which distinctly reflect an individualism whose formation is only possible predicating one's self against the collective as subject.

Lala Rukh's works seem superficially related to the environmental concerns (the chosen thematic of the exhibition) as they oversteps the bounds of the utilitarian framework by creating an environment of their own. As such they cannot be construed as plain symbols generating meaning only in relation to the issues they address; they are, in all their aesthetic and cultural ramifications, a respond to patriarchy and its attendant norms of representation of women as well as the convention of representation itself. The five sculptural pieces, exhibited at the group show titled Environmental Obsession, showcased at the Nalinikanto Bhattashali Gallery of the National Museum, from April 29 to May 9, 2012, make us pause as they release a multiplicity of narratives. The materials for her works are wooden structures, forged iron bati (used as a cutter in Bengali kitchens), pieces of lal-shaloo (red cotton used at mazaars), dry red chilly, coconut, side-pillows etc.

Lala Rukh believes that 'natural ingredients alone do not constitute the environment; human activity creates that environment.' This process of human activity has a familial or hereditary lineage. The formal edge attached to the objects of everyday functional use, used especially by the women predecessors of the family, and the continuance of their usage even today by the sculptor, brings to them the status of 'associationality'. The formal aspect of representing female (divine) power haunts the sculptor, and as Lala Rukh constructs her sculptural installations, they, in turn, form a feminine consciousness, a series of multitext against the meta-narratives of patriarchal construct.

If consciousness be understood as a rational process, then the sculptures of Lala Rukh also betray an inevitable opposition to her rationalism – and that is the sensuous/emotional aspect of her work. The sculptor names her five sculptures as Elements, which by itself is problematic, because they had been conceived by her through an associated evolutionary 'memory process' where the rural merges with the urban, as the personal and the collective becomes one without getting bogged down in the intellectual regour related to such fusion. In such an organic process, the body and the bodily sensation/emotion and knowledge, or muscle memory, are the only real properties which, together, 'arrive' at threshold to construct a semiosis only to negate patriarchy and the related epistemic realm. Thus, the sculptures of Lala Rukh are neither elemental nor is their mood cerebral. There is a constellation of experiences that may be identified as the source of the sympathy and the appeal of these sculptures. The way in which Lala Rukh's narratives get articulated may be thus described as a bridging of the personal-real with the social-real. We may frame it as '...the experience of emotions ... contextualized by events outside of the introspective self' (Andrew Strathern, Body Thoughts).

Even though there is an abundant presence of natural and traditional instrumental forms such as coconuts, side-pillows, axes etc in her work, they become auxiliary to her ultimate composition. Finally, in the words of the instrumentalist Lala Rukh, 'The body is man's first and most natural instrument or more accurately, not to speak of instruments, man's first and most natural technical means, is his body' (Mauss cited in Andrew Strathern).
The permanent ingredients like iron, wood and stone, are made to create spatiotemporal distribution of transient nature as they commingle with transient substances such as cloth, cotton or chilli. By her unique intertextual constructions she makes it possible to discern a dialectical relationship between objects of art and objects of everyday use. The indeterminacy of relations between objects and the humans is also foregrounded through the same framework in the context of the rhetorical value the objects gain once they lose their use value.

Lala Rukh's works translate the body and all other forms from outside the body into symbols of the body. Her 'bodily symbols may be used in an adult and serious way to confront problems of separation' (Douglas cited in Andrew Strathern). This separation, which is located within the discourse of civilization supplies the discursive element. Not only are the problems of such separation located within the hybrid geographies of the sculptural pieces of Lala Rukh, but they, in fact, seem to embody a contestation, a critique against those very problems. And there is a hint of a hypothetical cosmos in this festivity, where the existence of the bodied human is entire and organic.