From Raja Ravi Varma to L.N. Tallur, Indian artists have engaged with the topic of mythology to enrich their artworks with vivid stories and imagery from the past. Shine Shivan also grew up on these tales and uses their influence to create the artworks displayed in his latest exhibition, ‘In-cult’. This show is all about limits and boundaries, and uses the imagery of religious mythology and death to investigate them. This is Shivan’s sixth solo show including two solo presentations in Young International Artist Art Fair, Paris, and Art Brussels 31, Brussels. As you walk through the door of Sakshi Art Gallery in Colaba you are greeted by Govardhan the first piece of the puzzle in Shine’s Shivan’s ‘In-cult’. Intrigued by the stories of Lord Krishna, Shivan visited the Govardhan mountain and brought back this stone. The stone is fabled to be lifted by Krishna on his little finger in order to save a village from being submerged by torrential rain. The Krishna-Barbarik story in The Mahabharata is also linked to this idea. Krishna meets Barbarik who is given three arrows as a boon; one to destroy, one to sustain and the third to complete any task chosen by him with immediacy. When Krishna asks him to kill every leaf on a peepul tree, Barbarik shoots his arrows. Krishna however has hidden one leaf from the tree under his foot. Upon noticing this Barbarik tells Krishna that he must remove his foot otherwise the arrow will go through his foot in order to kill the last leaf. After Krishna picks up Govardhan and saves the village he tells the villagers that Govardhan is his own body. Therefore, like the leaf from the peepul tree, one piece of Krishna’s body in the form of a stone, has been hidden by Shivan, within the walls of Sakshi Art Gallery, thus making the worship by his followers incomplete. It poses the question to devotees who walk twenty-three kilometers around the mountain in a ritual called parikrama as to whether they have to now travel to a gallery in Mumbai to complete it. Shivan is also converting a gallery space into a place for worship by adding a layer to sacredness onto an already sacrosanct white cube.

The exhibition begins with the value of this stone, a simple but complex thought behind the significance of idol worship in India. When Shivan was ten years old living in Faridabad, he saw his uncle washing an idol in his studio. What he found peculiar was the fact that there was a stone stuck behind it and upon asking, his uncle revealed to him that it is not the idol that is worshiped but rather the stone behind it. “My work is semi-autobiographical. It comes from my home in Kerala, it’s ambience and the stories I’ve heard from different religious texts like the Vedas, the Quran, the Bible and the way I have related these stories to my own life,” says Shivan. There is then, a breaking of boundaries between and within religions through the subversion of religious stories by a minute act like the pocketing of a stone.

On the inside wall of the left side of the gallery, there is a calf whose face and limbs are missing; this is an animal that is reminiscent of Shivan’s childhood days. Villagers would stuff the dead carcass of a calf with hay in order for the mother cow to keep producing milk which they would then use and sell. Drawing from his memories, Shivan shares his readings where the cow is worshipped as Kamdhenu in Hindu scripture — it is therefore disturbing that the same animal is perhaps being manipulated and exploited. The very body of this ‘vehicle for the gods’ is being stuffed as a carcass for its owners economic gain. We are manipulating the senses of this ‘holy animal’ which is a rakshasi pavitra or demonic deed in the Vedas or holy scriptures. Furthermore, Shivan poses the question: are we in turn manipulating the senses of the gods and goddesses that reside within it? Semantically when the word Govardhan is broken apart; go means senses and vardhan literally translates to ‘the nourishing of the senses’. Cow in an Indian context is also symbolically seen as an animal from whom we gain nourishment. This work questions our hypocritical relationship with the animal keeping in mind the politics of cow in contemporary India. Since the holy animal, though worshipped, is often found dead with plastic in its stomach and is also psychologically manipulated for its milk.

The centre of the gallery has two carts placed one on top of the other, both created by ironsmiths from Rajasthan. According to their oral history, these objects belonged to a nomadic tribe. When Maharaja Pratap lost the battle against Aurangzeb, the ancestors of these ironsmiths came to his rescue and promised not to settle down until he won the war. Since Pratap never won, these people have remained nomads to this day. Shivan found a cart on the side of the road in Mehrauli however he did not buy the cart. He then gets a vision in his sleep, that he must go to Faridabad to find what he is looking for and when he gets there, he asks for this cart. This artwork therefore, shows the boundaries or lack of them as these people crossed many boarders creating weapons for the King and his army to fight. They also never settled down as a promise given to their king. The piece therefore looks at the boundaries being breached daily by the tribe in order to live within the boundaries of that promise and also by placing the cart in a gallery space. This ideology also stems from a Hindi proverb that Shivan was intrigued by —’pran jaye par vachan nahi’ which means ‘one may lose his life but not break his word’.

Artha Yatra: Birth of Yashtimadhu and Mohini, Medium Natural pigment on paper

Sex Fumes (2011) is another work by Shivan where he used collected material to make art. We can see a link from his previously exhibited work to his work here at Sakshi. Here, he uses deer faeces in order to make the sculpture by combining it with sand, branches, adhesive and resin. Shivan recalls his mother giving him a box of her hair that she has combed out of her head and collected later, asking him to make art out of it. These odd materials make the basis of many of his works and this is one of the ways that his family shows their support for him. He is interested in materials that come from the body — semen, faeces, hair which work well in relation to his conceptual frameworks of sexuality or romantic love. His piece Used Dicks (2009) looks at Freudian philosophy, the weaver bird and how it builds its nest. The male bird builds half a nest in order to attract the female. If she accepts, she will build the second half of the nest but if she doesn’t, the nest will be left incomplete. He looks at the two halves of the male and the female coming together to complete each other and how each is incomplete without the other. He also looks at the relationship a man has with a woman after coming out from his relationship with his mother. This is further explored in his piece Arth Yatra at Sakshi. It is in the employment of these unconventional materials that Shivan brings out the discomfort we feel about these subjects. The very materials used are raw and univocally human, bringing us back into thinking about the basal and its place in our lives. No matter how high we go, we are still ultimately made of these things that we would perhaps like to put at a distance from ourselves.

Drawings made from cactus spines and a natural brown pigment grace the wall in the main hall of the gallery. In 2001, Shivan wanted to start making etchings but was denied to do so by his teacher, and mentor, the renowned artist Kanchan Chander. On the other side of the wall are drawings of Kanchan Chander and an infant Shivan. He is sometimes playing in her lap, she is sometimes throwing him or scolding him. This shows his deep relationship and connection with his teacher whose situation he has thought about on many levels. She is the reason for his masterpiece on the opposite wall, Arth Yatra.

Arth Yatra consist of five drawings that were developed in 2018 and depict his own life stages. These pieces bring out the elements of the erotic, grotesque and the violent while elaborating on the imagery and dynamism of human anatomy. On the right side is Shiv and Mohini on the bottom left of the piece is his wife breastfeeding their new born baby. The second painting in the series depicts his wife in a terrifying form when giving birth. There is a moon on her head that is reflective of the moon-shaped scar on her stomach from a cesarean birth and also represents the goddess Kali. The next painting shows two women, each with a snake. This depicts Shivan’s own interaction with snakes and his fear of being coiled in one. In his next work, he uses the thistle which depicts a man who sins in Christianity. The painting shows a man getting his penis sucked but one can’t tell if the performer of the act is male or female. The snake itself is used in different mythologies: in Hinduism, it is wrapped around Shiva’s throat while in Christianity, it plays a vital role in the story of Adam and Eve. This idea of gods and devils/demons or devatas and rakshasas are part of every culture and Shivan draws on these stories to enrich his own art practice. By mixing mythology into his own life and bringing in human themes into a sacred space, Shivan is subverting the myths. He is also by bringing them into the gallery space therefore emphasizing the porous boundaries between mythological characters and narratives in contemporary art.

He therefore has found a loophole, a way to create what he wanted by circumventing the boundaries placed on him by his mentor. Using the cactus spines to create drawings that look like etchings without using the traditional process. Shivan is therefore pushing the boundary of etching and lithography by creating the same effect by hand through these drawings. These works are religious and mythological but the gods have been created into autobiographical characters, Shivan has modeled them on himself and his family. He calls them the Arth Yatra or journey of meaning therefore finding the meaning in his own life and also questioning if the Gods also belonged to the same plane as us mortals by adding himself and his family to the Hindu pantheon. Here, again we see a blurring of boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the high and the low, the religious and the worldly. In Shivan’s work there is, therefore, a breaking of boundaries through mixture; he is also questioning whether these boundaries exist or are only in our minds. We need limits in order to push against something but these lines we draw are often movable and boundaries are often porous.