Twisted water-filled pipes strung with see-through high heel lady sandals and snaking on floor against the backdrop of a seductive curtain, spotlessly clean and glistens with an aura of its own. The water being siphoned off from a sink well is not disinfected or purified.
The two images of impure water and a shining curtain -- a juxtaposition of the dirty with the clean -- catch your fancy with the sheer novelty of concept. It looks like a piece of live theatre.
"Dirty women, dirty water, dirty thoughts, dirty songs, dirty games, dirty mind, dirty war�Things called 'dirty' are defined primarily by the juxtaposition to what they are expected to be and are not their exact opposite: The uncontaminated, clean, pristine form of themselves," says Wangenchi Mutu, the Kenya-born New York-based artist.
A sculptor and anthropologist, Mutu has put up her installation, 'Dutty Water', at Aspinwall House, the major site of India's first three-month Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
'Dutty Water' is a work that expresses the artist's thoughts on how the idea of a clean and pure space is only a heavily guarded fiction, conveniently invented and deliberately fostered.
"In my mind there is no such thing as intrinsic purity; purity is rather our attempt to sterilise a space or a thing to make it more digestible to our minds," contends the 1972-born artist, the recipient of Deutsche Bank's 2010 Artist of the Year award. Women, in particular, find themselves intrinsically linked to this inflated idea of purity and cleanliness.
"The idea of desecrating a gallery space isn't mine alone; however, the concept of merging the idea of dirtiness and femaleness and turning them into a kind of sick dreamlike frontier and place of pilgrimage was what I was hoping for. Dutty Water is a metaphor for a place where worship and desecration are happening simultaneously," says Wangechi, a participant in the 2004 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea and the 2008 Prospect1 Biennial in New Orleans.
The see-through Lucite high heel sandals represent femaleness together with sexiness; they also represent an imposed hyper-sexualisation of women, and they represent women in sex-work.
"The curtain and the shiny lights draw the viewer in from a distance. This see-through cloth represents a veil where a kind of violence is encouraged and ignored to the point that in its repetitiveness it becomes an embellishment," says the artist, whose work has been exhibited at major institutions, including The Royal Academy, London.
Wangechi's work explores the female body as a site of engagement and provocation, and this she does by using samples from a multitude of image sources such as medical diagrams, glossy magazines, anthropology and pornographic materials.
About India's first biennale, Wangechi notes that it will go a long way to open up the necessary channels for artistic events like it to occur in the future.
