Lens on her lines: New show in Mumbai exhibits works by late artist Nasreen Mohamedi

Untitled vintage photographic prints by the late artist Nasreen Mohamedi that are part of the exhibition, Autobiography of a Line. Pics Courtesy/Chatterjee & Lal

While she was the celebrated modernist artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) to the world, for artist and curator Sasha Altaf, she was her beloved aunt, Nain khala. Full of stories and a devotee of Indian classical music, Nain khala was exactly like her works, which engaged with lines. "If we didn't keep our pencils straight, she would ask us to do so; if our plaits had a hair sticking out, she'd tell us you must stick it in," she remembers fondly.

The curator truly realised there was so much more to her aunt only when she turned an artist herself, and headed to Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU), Baroda, where Mohamedi taught. "Her ex-students and artists would tell me all these stories. At MSU, I discovered who Nasreen Mohamedi was." This continuous process of awe-inspiring discoveries about her khala has now led Altaf to curate Autobiography of a Line, an exhibition that traces the reception of the poetic image in Mohamedi's photographs, prints and paper cut-outs, for the first time in India.

The exhibition opened last week at Chatterjee & Lal in Colaba. The late artist, who was popular for her pen and ink drawings, had never displayed her photographs, gallerist Mortimer Chatterjee informs us. "I was aware of Nasreen's photographs, but hadn't encountered them physically. So, for me, it was a thrill to see them in reality," he shares.

From a curator's perspective, Altaf asserts the works are quite intriguing. The photographs, paper cut-outs and prints are all Mohamedi's experimentations with the line - her constant, primary source of language, which she explored through different mediums. During the summer, Altaf tells us, she read Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, which talks about how there's poetry in space. "It interrogates how everything from the attic to the basement to a drawer has a story. If I open a chest in your house, it tells me a lot about who you are and your poetry," Altaf elaborates, adding, "I felt that everyone talks so much about lines in Nasreen's works, but I think lines have a poetry of their own. I used that premise to understand her line, her space and her form."

A dated photo of Nasreen Mohamedi

Having been born in Karachi, raised in Mumbai and studied in London and Paris, a cosmopolitan upbringing has influenced much of her works, including the ones in the exhibition, reckons Chatterjee. "She also had a connection to Bahrain where some of her family lived. In fact, they ran a photography store and it was from them that she bought a lot of her equipment. Her cosmopolitan outlook fed into her photography in two ways - in terms of the actual locations where she was making them, and in terms of her perspective as a global artist," he notes. Together, the photographs conjure the portrait of a woman and an artist in the post-Independence era, out there in the world, capturing it through her lens.

Sasha Altaf and Mortimer Chatterjee

For Altaf, the exhibition has been an insight into her aunt's mind. "I'm a little bit more in awe of a woman who had a lot more to herself as an artist than we ever saw," she signs off.

Till: September 3, 11 am to 7 pm (Tuesday to Saturday)
At: Chatterjee & Lal, Arthur Bunder Road, Colaba
Call: 9820298246