Unweaving Colonization: NMWA’s “Matter from Myth”

What’s your favorite work of art? This question usually prompts a variety of answers from Michelangelo’s monumental marble sculptures to Monet’s colorful, cloudy water lilies. Yet, never once have I heard an answer that references a non cis-male artist nor an art form outside the four pillars of Western academy art: sculpture, painting, drawing, and etching. Artistic practices such as weaving, embroidery, and stitching often fall into the realm of “crafts” as opposed to “art,” not only because of the relative inexpensiveness of the trade but because the majority of these artists are women. As a result, the work of weavers and other textile artists are denied entry into the highest regards of the art world, particularly in museums. However in the National Museum of Women in the Art’s (NMWA) new exhibition Matter from Myth, artist Suchitra Mattai takes Western art ideologies and colonial narratives and weaves women of color and colonized peoples into the stories from which they have been so often excluded.

The exhibition opens with Mattai’s she arose (from a pool of tears), a life-size sculpture of an Indian dancer made entirely from worn saris woven together around armature. The viewer’s gaze immediately lands on this work, not only due to the bright hues of the saris but, more impressively, because of the pose of this sculpture. The dancer swings her arms upwards, balancing on one leg while the other kicks backwards, catching her in action as the viewer questions the physics behind such a massive piece. Mattai, the daughter of Indian indentured servants who were forced to migrate to Guyana, chose to honor what she refers to as the ‘South Asian diaspora’ by replicating a scene from Hindi religious festivals using saris. All of the saris used in this and other works in the gallery come from the women in her family when they were forced to move due to British colonization. She argues that her work highlights the beauty of the textiles native to her homeland instead of the traditionally Western and expensive marble to call attention to her heritage and the importance of preserving her family’s stories under colonization through art.

Suchitra Mattai, as we know it, as we dream it. Image courtesy of the NMWA.

As one moves through the gallery, Mattai’s work switches from in-the-round sculptures to two-dimensional tapestries. Although these textiles initially appear European in design and technique, their brightness and pops of color differ from their European counterparts, capturing the features of their figures with vibrant threads overlaying the original fabric. Here Mattai utilizes a practice she calls “brown reclamation,” where she sews darker threads over the faces and bodies of the white Europeans portrayed in these tapestries, typically in scenes depicting wealth and leisure in colonized lands. She uses this technique in works such as In the absence of power. In the presence of love., where she takes a European tapestry depicting the nativity scene from the Christian Bible and sews darker threads over the skin of one of the six figures: the Virgin Mary, whom she shows as an Indian woman wearing a sari and golden earrings. The woman looks lovingly at her child, and the four additional figures nearly blend into the background outlined with palm trees and mountains, drawing parallels between the Roman colonization of Judea and the British colonization of India. Mattai’s connecting and rewriting of colonized history calls attention to the way mothers often bear extraordinarily heavy burdens under institutions of colonization, racism, and patriarchy and the importance of putting mothers at the center of our decolonization efforts. 

The exhibition ends with another sculpture, this one interactive. Made from vintage saris, siren song is a circular tent where viewers can both circle the work’s bedazzling exterior and enter its dark interior where the light of the museum cannot reach. Once inside the work, viewers look up and realize a movie is playing above their heads, showing miles and miles of ocean waves beaming onto the sculpture’s ceiling. The darkness of the interior and the thickness of the walls, combined with the calming ocean scenes, create a sense of peace and security, a stark contrast to the violence and self-policing women, people of color, and colonized peoples experience daily. Mattai filmed this movie while retracing her ancestors’ journey from India to Guyana, who experienced exploitation by the British government following the forced servitude that colonized peoples were coerced into after the abolishment of enslavement in the U.K. By following and documenting her ancestors’ journey across the Indian Ocean, Mattai is taking the narrative out of the official history’s hands and giving the story back to her ancestors, recording what they saw and experienced under colonization. Telling stories of colonization from the perspective of colonized peoples strips away the authority colonizers have over official histories through reframing the narrative. Thus, the reclamation of both the ocean her ancestors crossed and the security of the work decolonizes not only her family’s history but her culture’s history as well.

Suchitra Mattai highlights the power of an art form traditionally relegated to the domestic sphere in order to show both the beauty in “women’s work” and the power this work has in decolonizing Western narratives. 

INDY

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Kami Steffenauer is a junior in the college studying Anthropology and Women's & Gender Studies. She is devastated that The Eras Tour will be ending in December and is currently looking for a new obsession.