Bengaluru-based Shilo Shiv Suleman is a force to reckon with within the magical realism art scene in India. Her name often pops up when one talks about illustrations and installations that celebrate the confluence of art and technology. Even her latest collaboration with Johnnie Walker Black Label is a much-touted classic case of man meets machine.
We spoke to the contemporary artiste about the project where she designed bottle labels using Air Ink Technology (known to convert pollution into ink). Taking about reducing carbon footprint with her art, Shilo points to the irony of converting an environmental concern into sustainable art. “It’s one of those things which is equally tragic and magic. It is sad that there’s so much pollution that we have enough to even make it into paint. But I would also say that it's alchemy and that’s very close to my own practice. A lot of my own practice is about turning pain, trauma and suffering into art. For me, it was an ideological connection that one can turn true blackness into beauty,” she begins.
We use this chat as an opportunity to know more about Pulse and Boom, an internationally acclaimed art piece for which Shilo won the Burning Man Honorarium Art Grant in 2014. Talking to us about what inspired the installation, Shilo shares a rather beautiful finding and says, “There are so many things about the human body that we cannot articulate or recognise. For instance, they say that when two people fall in love, their hearts actually start to beat in time with each other. And that’s why they say that when you break up with someone, you are broken because you have lost the partner to heal your heart. And so we decided to use it to make these, you know, invisible worlds visible.”
Having started her career at a young age after publishing a children’s illustration book, Shilo confirms that Bengaluru had a lot to do with her early art influences. Augmented reality piqued her interest as an artiste back in the day and while she continues to focus on it in some of her pieces; self-love, reclaiming femininity and celebrating cultural heritage are her latest fixations. Speaking to us about exploring these new themes with self-portraits and even wearable art, Shilo shares that the pieces help her develop agency over her own body.
“For me, art has always been a way to move from who I am told to be to who I want to be. Self-portrait, to me, is an act of self-knowledge but it is also an act of self-worship: a way to recognise ourselves as being sacred,” she adds. She continues and reveals that her last few projects have been an attempt to reclaim rituals of the past and make them relevant to this day. “I think a lot of people in India right now don’t fully understand art. If you look at the masses, for them art is a luxury object; something that is supposed to live in ivory towers and not engage with their world in any way. But a big part of my own practice is rooted in ancestral notions of what art is,” Shilo begins.
She explains, “Think about it, if we look at pre-colonial times in India, we didn’t have galleries or exclusive spaces where our art existed. Beauty was everywhere. It was a part of our worship, our ceremonies, our rituals, our utensils, our weapons and even our bindis. It was also very common for your grandmother to be a Carnatic singer or your uncle to be an Urdu poet. From where I look at it, I am very interested in de-colonising art.” De-colonisation is also something Shilo wishes to achieve with her work in the long run. That and “standing for a feminine, incredibly different and equivocal approach to art,” she concludes.
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