Merging Constellations

Rumi Samadhan

Rumi Samadhan responds to Nasreen Mohmedi’s oeuvre through her visual reflections represented in digital compositions infused with ink and graphite drawings. Rumi tries to bring together various artistic influences and visual references that shaped Mohmedi’s art practice. She has developed this series through her close readings of Mohmedi’s diary entries as well as art vocabulary that Mohmedi employed in her practice.

Firstly, Rumi responds to textual entries, handwriting, drawings, vistages, sketches in Mohamedi’s diary to re-imagine and re-create her life while building a new set of visual narratives. The diary works as an entry point to understand Mohmedi’s artistic process concerning colour, shape, form and line, as well as, her inner world that she imagined and realized while intently and intensely living through gradually deteriorating health. Mohamedi’s distinct mode of drawings in grids as a matrix, her rectilinear structural works in diagonals, and curved shaped dimensional constellations have provided Rumi provocations in creating this series.

Secondly, Rumi’s visual interpretations refer to Mohmedi’s close observations of geometric formalism as well as lyrical abstraction in her works. Mondrian’s rectilinear grid, Arab mathematician Alhazen’s notion of perspective, Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich’s geometric preposition and diagonals helped Mohmedi format her unique vocabulary of self conceptualizing formalism. Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky’s metaphysical abstractions inclined her towards the spiritual in art. Carrying forward the lineage of the metaphysical abstraction, Mohmedi managed to retain and develop her individual visual language even when she was around her Indian artist colleagues V. S. Gaitonde at the Bhulabhai Desai Institute and Jeram Patel in Baroda. Her influences reflected into thought processes and ordained in her works maintaining the ethics of making the maximum out of minimum.