Shakuntala Kulkarni’s Work Pays Attention To Women’s Experiences And Spaces

If you watched the Dior Autumn/Winter 2024-2025 Ready-to-Wear show at the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris earlier this year, you could not have missed the vivid scenography of nine sculptural cane warriors dressed in skirts, “at the convergence of performance and contemplation”, that stood silent witness to the French luxury house’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s sartorial line-up inspired by the late ’60s with dresses, trench coats, trousers embellished with XXL iterations of the Miss Dior logo. These forms or “cane armour” from the Of Bodies, Armour And Cages (2012) series were presented in tandem with 15-foot-high stills from the multimedia installation Juloos And Other Stories and together they presented a metaphor for the power of the female body. You could however have missed a slim lady in her early seventies, in a black kasuti sari that her daughter had helped her drape, sitting in the audience. She is Shakuntala Kulkarni, the veteran artist who, in her work, is intent on exploring the politics of the female body especially in relation to urban spaces. Kulkarni is the protagonist of her work Juloos And Other Stories and has created the cane installations in her Mumbai studio.  

Today, on a street in Juhu, pitted with roadworks and lined with dusty trees, I stand in front of a nondescript building scheduled for demolition. On the ground floor, a small apartment stained with the marks of an artist at work, functions as Kulkarni’s studio. The walls of one room are lined with white boards covered with sketches, drawings and scribblings, the bases of Kulkarni’s creations. Giant diagrams in charcoal of the cane armour created for the Armour For The Brides (2022) project and its fantastical headgear, complete with measurements, calculations and other details, stretch across the boards which display scrawlings like “fallen warrior”, “unable to balance”, “muddy waters”, a clue into the thought processes that have driven Kulkarni’s work in the last decades.

This is Kulkarni’s safe space where no one may disturb her. It is evident here that everything that this multidisciplinary, contemporary artist does starts with drawing which is almost a compulsion. But whether it was her earlier abstract paintings, printmaking and films or later sculptural forms, the investigation behind her oeuvre remains constant — an ongoing inquiry into the lives of urban women and their spaces. “I was looking at these public and private spaces like the home space, work space, cultural and social space within the society which is essentially patriarchal, where women, because of the restrictions put on them, face a lot of fear, discomfort, alienation, anxiety, claustrophobia….” she says.   

“I have been thinking this way for a very long time,” Kulkarni reminisces, harking back to her 2001 video installation Reduced Spaces — “where the spaces of the women are reduced because of the restrictions put on them” — that had been mounted at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. I discover a few of the videos online and watch them. I Want To Say Something, with the protagonist’s soundless mouthing, takes me back to moments in my own life where staying silent had been the only option. In similar mode is 2002’s Confinement, a film triggered by the news of the atrocities committed on women during the Gujarat riots. “The film is about despair and hope and deals with the struggle of the women who were trying to cope with the violence during the riots,” Kulkarni says.

Dressed today in simple cotton trousers and a top (she tells us later that she loves wearing lungis and has a collection from around the world), Kulkarni’s innate energy is palpable as she speaks incessantly of her concerns. But this was not always so. What in Kulkarni’s own life triggered this deep inquiry? “My three sisters and I grew up in a family which is very, very open,” she says. “There was no discrimination at all.” But her gender proved to be an obstacle during her college years — she has a diploma in painting and post-graduation in mural from Sir J. J. School of Art, Mumbai — and later in the outside world, personal and shared experiences made her scrutinise the relationship between women and their bodies in society at large. This led to her investigating, at first, the status of the domestic space. She began observing her mother, her grandmother, her relatives and the choices they had made. Later, she married into a family that is “open and forward-looking”, according to her. “And yet there were some expectations, and I felt the restrictions,” she says.  

The 2004 Ajjinchya Goshti (Grandmother’s Tales) continued this inquiry into women’s urban spaces through films set in an intimate space, women’s homes. It all started when Kulkarni visited her mother-in-law one day at her home in Mahim and discovered a kitty party where the ladies were busy gossiping. In an attempt to find them something interesting, she began to carry her portable VCR along to show them interesting videos like Paulkhuna, a series about women depicted in the early 19th-century writings in India. This gave Kulkarni the idea of interviewing these grandmothers about their own lives. “It is a synchronised work with one woman talking, another listening, with close-ups of what they were doing — knitting, peeling, kneading the dough….” she describes. And then something happened which had not been her intention. Some students who happened to view these videos realised that they had never actually listened to the stories of their own grandmothers and started to do so. “So, suddenly, because of this oral history, there was a connection,” Kulkarni says.

She is tearing the bubble wrap off of several small reverse paintings on glass and fabric. These formed part of one of her most ambitious exhibitions, the multimedia installation consisting of performance videos and mixed-media paintings, And When She Roared The Universe Quaked, mounted in 2007 at Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai. In 2006, Kulkarni had started lessons in karate, aikido and shooting bows and arrows. “It is not about hitting someone, kicking someone, shooting someone. For me, karate is about balance, about courage, about building up your dignity,” she clarifies her intent. While the stances, the bows and arrows, the blood and gore even, in these small paintings, in a sense speak to the normalising of violence against women, they point as well to productive action on the part of women. Interestingly, these paintings were installed in groups on the ceiling that spectators could view through hand-held magnifying mirrors, so that they were manipulating their own reflections and that of others to somehow navigate the space to get a good view. “So, I made you uncomfortable looking up, because women do experience discomfort with simple things, like when men whistle or follow you. And, besides, the question was, what is the object? Who’s the observer? Who’s being observed? I looked at it as an objectification of the body….”

The exhibition also displayed short films with the aim to create that discomfort that women must endure. Four of the six video installations were based on games that the artist played as a young girl which she uses as a metaphor for power play — kabaddi, tug of war and blind man’s buff. “The work interrogates what kinds of representations make it possible for the voices and bodies of ‘Indian women’ to not be completely anchored to spaces dictated by predominantly patriarchal tropes,” writes academic and film-maker Shalmalee Palekar. In another video, The Role I Would Like to Play Messiah II, the protagonist rips open her chest to reveal the warrior within, creating a visual within a visual. While in the painting Unsung Epics, the woman rips open her chest to reveal merely darkness. A large charcoal work Unsung Epics III further makes the viewer feel the anguish that women feel.

Kulkarni, today an international figure in the art world, is perhaps best known for her cane armour sculptures, recently witnessed at the Dior show. The provenance of those installations goes as far back as 2012 when an exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road, Of Bodies, Armour And Cages, included site-specific multi-media works, multidisciplinary installations consisting of cane armour, performance photographs, live performance, videos and interactive works. Kulkarni tells us that she envisioned her creations in cane as “armour for women to protect themselves in order to be able to endure in a misogynistic society”. She posed for photo performances and videos dressed in the “armour” in her workshop as also against Mumbai’s horizon and high rises, on the steps of the Asiatic Library and while crossing a busy city road, combining performance with art. “I wanted to say something huge about my relationship with inner space, outer space, while posing for these. When I was standing there on the steps of the Asiatic Library, it was a very powerful thing.”

Slipping into her wearable sculpture in her studio today, you can see how protective she is of her creation, though an interactive project had allowed viewers to wear the headgear and experience themselves in a mirror. She points to the second piece of armour that stands silently on its pedestal in the workshop, this one in cane trousers that the artisan Dinesh had refused to create for months, until she tapped into his love for Bollywood, suggesting that he should make them resemble Amitabh Bachchan’s white pair in Amar Akbar Anthony (1977). Creating breasts for the armour proved to be another hurdle “because he was embarrassed coming from a different culture, a different background”. But this too was overcome with patience and tact. Now, she stands tall and powerful surrounded by the cane skeleton even though her movements are restricted and comical, creating a paradox. “I made it to protect the female body from violence but the mechanism of the armour is such that when you wear it your body is trapped,” she says.

During COVID-19 and the lockdown days, Kulkarni kept busy clearing out her studio, even as she read horrifying newspaper accounts about atrocities committed against women, like the one of the young girl who was raped repeatedly by her own doctor. “I will remain as free and powerful as ever, even in this confined space,” she remembers thinking then. Rummaging around her small studio space, she discovered some khadi paper that she had bought from Pune some 35 years ago and which “had turned beautifully yellow”. Liking the texture, she pinned these up on her studio walls. At the time, she was concerned with the forms of the older female body and its movements, with “the breasts and muscles drooping”, discovering a kind of beauty in that. She started sketching these forms and when it came to dressing them, she went back to viewing the work of her favourite Japanese designers, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, as well as that of Alexander McQueen. She was fascinated in particular with their use of the colour black.

“The black charcoal came to instant rescue aiding the costumes that her women began to dress in — with their dark, dense, and heavy shapes, creating an opacity that felt unexpected and joyful in their ‘non-colour’,” writes gallerist Shireen Gandhy. Kulkarni started researching hairstyles, from Bollywood, Japan, old Greek and Biblical styles to styles she observed on the street, giving the silhouettes of these ballooning figures a distinctive edge through the artist’s imaginings of their hair. At the time Kulkarni was also fixated on watching a young Chinese skater who had won an Olympic medal in figure skating in 2014, and from this the idea of balance-imbalance was resurrected. “These were my interests,” she says now, “I was trapped in this room, in a confined space, and suddenly they all came together.”

These influences culminated in a series of charcoal drawings — on handmade khadi paper, stark in black, a colour that she had always loved, that were displayed in Chemould Prescott Road in 2023, in the exhibition Quieter Than Silence, Compilation Of Short Stories. Unravelling from behind its bubble wrap cover today, from a neatly labelled stack of paintings, is a large work from this collection, titled Stuck In the Shadow. We see a mature figure with its clothes in silhouette, as though fused with the body, the hair a fantasy influenced perhaps by Japanese styles, also somewhat futuristic in appearance. The voluminous black form crouches on a dot on which it balances. It seems to be in control. “So, my question was, within that tiny circle, how would you balance yourself? It’s about balancing/not being able to balance. This one is about powerfully being able to deal with it. But, in some of my other drawings, they’re not being able to deal with it,” Kulkarni says. “This series depicts different shades of being vulnerable, resigned, feeling pain and anguish while at the same time powerfully moving forward with dignity and self-respect.”

And so Kulkarni’s work continues to delve into the female body politics. In Paris, during the Dior show, she asked Chiuri why she had chosen the cane warriors for the ready-to-wear show. The idea of protecting the female body and also trapping it had resonated with her, Chiuri had responded. “You do it with cane, I do it with clothes. We also invite the gaze and cut the gaze, as you do.” It is now apparent that Kulkarni’s work will continue to draw attention to the female body and its condition while aiming to deflate the gaze at the same time. Because that’s what her art does.