Siona Benjamin’s wonderful and beautiful exhibition ‘Siona Benjamin: Beyond Borders’ at the ACA Galleries in Manhattan, New York, through April 22, 2017, is the installation ‘My Magic Carpet’, by the Mumbai-born and raised, of Bene Israel Jewish descent, who calls New Jersey her home.
Aasif Mandvi Organizing all-star “deportation jamboree” in New York
Benjamin’s riveting paintings explodes in myriad colors from every wall of the gallery. It blossoms into an incandescent poetry as one looks on to the layers of complex meaning, unraveling like spools of multi-colored thread unwinding in slow motion, leaving trails of unnamed sadness that lingers long after one walks out of the gallery in twilight, to be comforted by the more predictable lights emitted from buildings, towers and hoardings.
In many of her works, worn-out, anguished women imbued with blue skin like that of God Krishna have wings, but fly too close to the ground, in perpetual peril of being ambushed, pulled down to the ground, ravished of the last vestiges of happiness and identity.
Benjamin’s women drip blood, look beseechingly for divine help, succor, shrouded in the company of men, ghouls, devils, beasts and snakes, who encompass them, seem to offer panacea, death or worse. Some women, as if shorn of their wings, try to bring down those escaping wings with arrow, as futile perhaps as trying to get a severed umbilical cord back. Some seem to be on the verge of immolation,of performing Sati.
A grid of 24 black-and-white portraits of Syrian refugees framed in marbling – a technique she uses a lot in many of her new works, a composition of anguish and grace in times of despair, collated from news reportage, titled ‘Exodus’. The inviting and tastefully decorated ‘My Magic Carpet’, the inmates have been perhaps hounded out, killed or maimed, driven to lands far away; the exodus is real as it can ever be in today’s world of blocked boundaries, gun-toting guards at borders.
‘My Magic Carpet’ is complete when one looks at the pain of humanity that Benjamin has nurtured to evoke as a work of art, in those 24 portraits. As the men, women and children of Syria get eviscerated with chemical weapons, bombs, rapes and murder, it’s portraits like that drawn by Benjamin will be a testament to cruelty and lost dignity.
Benjamin’s influences are from miniature Indian and Persian paintings, Byzantine icons, Jewish and Christian illuminated manuscripts, with pop cultural elements like Bollywood film posters.
Indian American Debasish Dutta, New Chancellor of Rutgers University
Benjamin’s exhibited works at ACA Galleries and her wider repertoire, is the utter helplessness of the artist herself, to her sub-conscious reality, derived from her dislocation from India. It seems she cannot shake off India and its influence no matter how much, or how far she travels, how many rich colors of gouache she applies to her works.
Benjamin’s exhibition at ACA Galleries is as beautiful a work from an artist of Indian-origin as there ever has been.
By Premji
