Chitra Ganesh on Rummana Hussain, Art Asia Pacific, April 2024
Rummana Hussain (1952–1999) is widely considered one of India’s foremost conceptual artists. I had the great fortune of seeing her last solo show before she died, “In Order to Join,” held at Art in General in New York in October 1998. The exhibition was a culmination of a months-long residency, and the convergence of Hussain’s work with this space was, in itself, extraordinary. The site-specific installation featured a projected video of her walking barefoot across the Queensboro Bridge (which connects Manhattan and Queens), combined with found objects such as hair and costume jewelry. The exhibition impacted me as a 23-year-old who had recently lost her mother, and Hussain’s practice continues to move me. Her vision is more vital than ever in 2024’s geopolitical climate, the waves of which are as evident in the art world as they are further afield, where we are constantly negotiating the implications of destruction and erasure.
Born into a prominent Muslim family, Hussain began her career as a painter working on canvas and paper. Both the artist and her practice were irrevocably transformed by the devastating events of 1992 in the town of Ayodhya in northern India when a centuries-old mosque, the Babri Masjid, was destroyed by an organized mob of Hindu extremists. At the time of its destruction, Hussain experienced the repercussions of incitement to violence against Muslims firsthand, became immersed in activism, and pivoted toward sculpture, performance, and installation. She then began to use her own body and materials, such as papayas and earthenware, to illuminate the fault lines of geography and the psyche, participating in collective resistance against the forces of religious nationalism through her work. My own work has drawn inspiration from Hussain’s treatment of the body as a contested site of political and psychic rupture, and from her use of everyday objects—including signifiers of femininity such as jewelry and locks of hair—alongside materials such as a mirror and crumbled earth, as sculptural materials that link embodied resistance with quotidian life.
RUMMANA HUSSAIN, Dissected Projection, 1993, wood, mirror, terracotta, and acrylic, 140 × 140 cm. Courtesy Talwar Gallery, New York/Delhi.