Lavanya Mani despised chemistry in school. But as psychologist Carl Jung said, “What you resist, persists.” As an artist, she developed a natural chemistry with dyes and pigments, all of which she makes herself from organic materials. “Artists go to paint and stationary shops to buy supplies, I go to Ayurveda stores,” says Bengaluru-based Mani whose works were part of a recent exhibition, Green Snake, at Tai Kwun in Hong Kong.
The show, featuring over 30 artists and collectives from across the world, looked at art in connection with mythologies and imagined the future in the context of climate change. To apply her earth philosophy in her work, Mani turned to the everlasting mythological story of Hanuman lifting an entire mountain to bring the Sanjivani booti to a dying Lakshman; the result was Herbarium, one of the most striking pieces displayed at the exhibition that ran parallel to the Art Basel Hong Kong fair.
True to its title, the richly hued canvas features a plethora of plants, herbs and flowers. Mani invokes the Ramayana myth by placing the greens within an outline of a mountain, which is held in place by a pair of clawed hands. Explaining the contemporary relevance of the image, Mani says, “There are two things I was working with. According to mythology, Hanuman uprooted this piece of land from somewhere, but we are not told how the people there reacted to it; the herb was no longer there. I am connecting that to colonisation and how plants were taken from India; slaves were taken from India, and uprooted from their land. Scientists say that this (movement) is the basis of modernity, but that actually affects climate change in the long run.”
Colonial history has been the primary area of investigation of Mani’s career spanning over two decades. Environment was not on her mind when she chose eco-friendly mediums of fabric and natural dyes and pigments to work with after graduating from MS University, Baroda in 2001. The progression of her practice into becoming an inquiry of the ongoing climate crisis is as recent as five years old.
It was triggered, she recalls, by a seemingly innocuous development around her once-green environs in Bengaluru’s Gandhi Nagar locality. “I was living in a place where it was so green. I could see Nilgais from my room,” she says, adding, “And suddenly all the green cover was gone after buildings came up. That was the point I started thinking of the world in environmental terms.”
No Man’s Land
This sense of urgency to act in times of a looming crisis gets encapsulated in a rather provocative triptych, titled No Man’s Land, showcasing the aftermath of a very likely climatic catastrophe. The right panel, among other things, shows a mosquito head perched upon what looks like a drone. On the left, there is a nerve ending that can be misconstrued as a tree. In the centre is a desertscape, and raining on it are tongues of flame—perhaps a visual allegory for nature’s wrath.
“I wanted to imagine a post-apocalyptic world, and show how machines have started replicating living things, and the intermingling of living organisms and machinery. I wanted to put forth the question, ‘Where are we headed?’” says the artist, who is part of another exhibition on a similar theme—The Ocean in the Forest—underway at the Wanås Konst museum in Sweden.
Mani’s avatar as a champion of the environment is recent, but she is among the handful of contemporary Indian artists whose works strive to ask difficult yet imperative questions about the environment, putting the planet’s future in perspective for viewers. Better green than never.
