Confronting Image and Imagination

Abul Mansur

Dilara Begum Jolly’s works have fascinated the viewers with their extraordinarily rich imagery and eloquent fantasy since about last twenty years. Her works weave a vivid tapestry of forms and colours, but beside their apparent charm they display, at the same time, a deep commitment towards her convictions. In the intermittent years since her last solo exhibition in 2001 Jolly seems to have drifted further away from depicting the naturalistic actuality and her recent works appear to dwell in a world between representation of the visual image and extravagant imagination. This exhibition, which she calls ‘Excavating Time’, showcases her works done in the last five years and are executed in acrylic on canvas and watercolour and pen and ink on paper.

Jolly, in the meantime, has been witness to dreadful events that have taken place in the international arena and, like many of us, has developed strong opinions about them. These events have generated anger and protest and to release her feelings she has taken up her weapons– brush, pen and colour. The western aggression on Iraq was circulated in the electronic and print media in such dimensions that its suspense and shock has overwhelmed the human psyche across the world. Hundreds and thousands of visual images through newspapers, television channels, videos and e-mails have inundated our visual capacities to such an extent that any anticipation of that occurrence was bound to be conditioned by those images. For a visual artist, the situation was one of representation of an event in a creative mode which has already overpowered our visual limits. Restraining her works from becoming only pictorial repetitions or statements of the facts was a great challenge for an artist who intended to convey her reactions in the same two-dimensional visual format as her raw materials were. Fortunately, Jolly has not only shown a sense of great control over her emotions, but has also displayed ample capacity of transforming and fantasizing the available images and recreated them into aesthetically authentic works of art. Her use of historical images from ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian civilizations of the area has contributed emphatically towards this transformation.

Jolly’s imagination began taking shape in a spontaneous manner. Her mind holds numerous pockets of images and shapes which travel in a buoyant world and are subject to any kind of and as much distortions as could be conceived. These images group and regroup between them and create some statements which, on most occasions, refer to events in the international arena with particular emphasis on atrocities upon women. Jolly strongly upholds her feminist stand and lashes out not only at exploitation of women perpetuated by religious dogmatism but also against repression of women in other forms, particularly during times of war and conflict.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that Jolly’s works do not convey her comments as candidly as is expected of her. And this is a characteristic which makes Jolly a painter to be watched carefully and attentively. When looking at Jolly’s paintings, one has to keep in mind her preoccupation with women at large. At the same time one has to keep him/herself aware so that one does not miss the wonderful imagination and fantasia, the subtle and complex way of building her story and the expressive quality of her pictorial language. One should also not forget to mention at this point that Jolly does not work with paint only. She actually started as a printmaker and does castings and installations as well. Her multi-dimensional activities in the fields of visual arts have given her a kind of command on mediums with which she is able to transform her critical comments into playful presentations. This distinctive quality of playfulness is more characteristically evident in Jolly’s watercolours and drawings which perhaps serve as interludes between her painting sessions in oils and acrylics.

It is a matter of great pleasure that Jolly’s present exhibition includes a good number of watercolours and pen-drawings along with her paintings in acrylic. Most of her works showcased here are part of some series paintings which she has done on different issues since 2001. The series include Embryo Withdrawn, Birds of Paradise, Before the End of Time, After the End of time, Sculpting Time etc. Apart from these, a good number of Study and Drawings are displayed. Sculpting Time is undoubtedly a series that demands prime attention in this show. These paintings in watercolour are inspired by the Iraq events and display a considerable change in Jolly’s mode of expression. Whereas her previous characteristics appear to display some closeness to naivete, these watercolours come closer to, which could be termed as stark reality described in the form of absurd fantasy. To depict her reactions to events in Iraq, Jolly uses numerous allegories and symbols. She manipulates symbols as obvious as women in veil, flag of the aggressors, images from photographs of atrocities by western army in Iraq and religious priests in beards and long-skirts. However she also incorporates in her paintings such historical images as Venus of Willendorf, Ziggurat, The Ishtar gate and Sumerian and Babylonian images from Baghdad Museum and her distinctive choices also include unrealistic and imaginary birds, hands and feet in despair, wings, flower petals and threatening animal faces. She transforms them into her own kind of personal mannerism that forms the pictorial language, which is distinctively Jolly’s.

The present exhibition by Dilara Begum Jolly displays a considerable shift from her previous characteristics. But, at the same time, it retains that particular temperament which distinguishes Jolly as one of our most distinctive painters.

Date: 04/09/2006 – 17/08/2006
Venue: Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts