Moving trans issues forward at Cannes
Transgender identity and issues are a theme at the Cannes Film Festival 2024
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he pairing of Meera Mukherjee with Jaidev Baghel in the Outside In exhibition at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru (on till 20 October) is an intriguing one.
Mukherjee was 26 years older than Baghel. When she visited his father, Sriman, in Kondagaon in Chhattisgarh in the early 1960s to learn Dhokra metal casting, Jaidev would have barely been an adolescent.
While there may be some evidence to suggest that they met, it is unlikely they collaborated or influenced each other during their long careers. The connections are therefore apparent only in their shared metal casting approach using the lost wax method, and the presence of common folk in both their sculptures.
The most synergistic pairing, in hindsight, is served as soon as one enters the exhibition. He Who Saw, one of Mukherjee’s early works, is a towering two-metre-high figure. It was inspired by the local deities she saw during her visits to Bastar, and is meant to represent the one who witnessed the creation of the world.
Her work is presented alongside Panch Mukhi Vandevi (Five-Headed Forest Goddess), Baghel’s polemic response to the exploitation of the environment in his region, where a glowering five-headed-goddess of the forest foretells the destruction of the world.
Throughout the exhibition, Mukherjee’s firebrand approach shimmers through the dark purple setting of the exhibition. Rain (1980), perhaps the most evocative of her works on show, captures masses huddled against a monsoon downpour. The water fails to pierce and drips down the bodies, its force of nature renIn dered futile by human solidarity against the lopsided odds.
Mukherjee’s virtuoso metal work is epitomised by the way she has made the water glisten on the faces and the bodies, while the formation of green patina has added a surreal layer over time.
Nearby is Coal Miners (1980), another haunting sculpture made in the same year, which shows the pathos of a densely packed group of miners, exploited under inhuman working conditions.
The embroidered kantha works I came across subsequently in the exhibition, albeit exemplifiers of her community-based art practice, struggled to spark a dialogue with Baghel’s works, and would be best experienced in isolation.
Critically engaging with her works remains incomplete without appreciating her journey. She was a young divorcee left to fend for herself in a conservative post-independence Bengali society, who rejected painting and took to sculpture, and looked to indigenous crafts for inspiration—she went against the odds on many fronts and lived life on her own terms.
Many of Baghel’s works are representations of the men and women from the Madia community, who were the main patrons for Ghadwa sculptors like him.
A work that stands out is
(2007), where he sculpted local gods as a working adivasi couple, bridging folk mythology and the everyday.
Lakkad Deo, the woodcutter god, has an axe over his shoulder; Gappa Dei is shown with a basket on her head and a crowbar in her hand, dressed as an adivasi.
A closer look at the sculpture also reveals mother earth opening up and reptiles and insects crawling out, drawing attention to our diverse forest ecosystems.
In Tree of Life (2006), another work drawn from folk ecology, Baghel creates the kalpavriksha (a wish-fulfilling divine tree, which is of immense significance in religions such as Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism) but embodied by the Mahua tree. It emphasizes the pivotal role this tree plays in the lives of the adivasi communities of central India.
By proclaiming the Mahua tree as their Banyan, Baghel asserts that indigenous people have their own beliefs, rituals and customs whose pluralism need to be acknowledged and celebrated.
Baghel’s Raodeo (2012-2024) has an interesting story. When the curators visited the late artist’s home in Chhattisgarh earlier this year, they came across his unused moulds. With the involvement of his son Bhupendra, who now runs the workshop, they commissioned this piece, unsure how it would turn out after all these years.
The sculpture of the tribal god, feared for shooting weapons at those who dare pass by his side, materialised fairly robustly, perhaps as a defiant metaphor in support of Baghel’s legacy.
The exhibition ultimately ends up as a study of contrasts, rather than welding convergences. While Baghel’s works are rooted in representation of his community; Mukherjee’s are liberated by their depictions of humanity.
Her works are more palpable in their subversion and forceful in their expression. Home-schooled Baghel on the other hand walked a fine line between authenticity and innovation.
an endeavour to be better recognised as an artist, he started signing his works, created his own iconographies and explored non-traditional themes.
Their works do not stylistically resemble each other—Meera’s exhibited figures are somewhat abstracted, roughly finished and intense, while Baghel’s are more precise, ornamental and serene.
Mukherjee’s works in the exhibition come from the personal collection of Radhika and Abhishek Poddar (who are also the foundertrustees of MAP), while the works of Baghel are from a single unnamed Indian private collector.
Mukherjee’s works are spread across a wider timeframe; almost all of Baghel’s works on show are from a brief three-year period from 2004 to 2007. While that makes the curation appear convenient and limited, the exhibition does manage to raise germane issues.
The documentary film accompanying the exhibition highlights the vital need to preserve the artistic traditions of the indigenous communities, without leaving them dependent on the mass market for their survival.
Amid the ongoing centennial celebrations of many male modernist peers, Meera Mukherjee’s has come and gone quietly last year, which makes this exhibition a timely intervention.
Perhaps From the Depth of the Mould, the commemorative book on her to be released shortly, will put her life and work in focus once again. feedback@livemint.com
Trans identities have emerged as a recurring theme at the Cannes Film Festival this year, including in frontrunner Emilia Perez. The musical by Cannes veteran Jacques Audiard about a drug lord with a family who has always wanted to be a woman stars Karla Sofia Gascon.
The 52-year-old has written a book about having a gender transition operation at the age of 46, when she already had an acting career, a wife and a daughter. “It was a very tough journey,” she told AFP, hailing her family’s courage.
The film has earned particular praise for not fixating on the gender transition, but moving far beyond to explore themes of parenthood, love and the victims of Mexico’s gang violence. Audiard, 72, sensitively portrays the main character’s intimate struggle to be herself.
“It’s surprising to see this issue being picked up by seasoned filmmakers, who are often cisgender outside the LGBT sphere,” said Franck Finance-Madureira, the founder of the Cannes Queer Palm. “It’s been the emerging issue in the LGBT fight for a decade now, and it was about time we had trans leads in films.”
“It took 30 years to normalise gay or lesbian characters, but with trans characters it’s going much faster,” he added. Increasingly more films are including gender identity, an issue first explored in films like Laurence Anyways by Xavier Dolan in 2012 and Girl by Lukas Dhont in 2018.
Among them is Argentinian director Daniel Burman’s Transmitzvah. The feature, which premiered at a public screening out of competition, follows a Jewish boy who wants to be a girl and does not want the religious initiation ceremony for boys called a bar mitzvah.
Burman said trans identity needs to be included in cinema but not as a be-all and end-all. “We should render these situations visible but not lock ourselves in them,” he said. “There is excessive focus on gender identity as the only pillar of identity.”
Trans actors now mostly play trans roles. But Hunter Schafer, who has been on the Cannes red carpet after acting in Palme d’Or contender Kinds of Kindness, in April said she no longer wanted to play queer roles. “I worked so hard to get to where I am, past these really hard points in my transition, and now I just want to be a girl and finally move on,” the 25-year-old, who broke through in Euphoria, told GQ magazine.
Trans women also starred in The Belle of Gaza, a documentary screening out of competition and unrelated to the conflict. The film is an intimate portrait of Palestinian trans women living on the margins of Israeli society in Tel Aviv, whom French filmmaker Yolande Zauberman calls “warriors of their own destiny”.
It took 30 years to normalise gay or lesbian characters, but with trans characters it’s much faster