The stars of ‘Challengers’ on its love triangle
A retrospective in Delhi celebrates the artist’s legacy, while delving deep into her close engagement with feminism and justice Tennis is the arena where attraction and emotion in this film spills out It’s a big-screen statement especially for Zendaya, wh
You can’t simply look at Gogi Saroj Pal’s work. You need to pause, and allow her nayikas, or heroines, to speak to you. It’s only then that you can meaningfully engage with her art.
The artist, who passed away in January this year at the age of 79 after a fall, is remembered by many in the art fraternity as feisty, brave and courageous.
DAG is celebrating her legacy with a retrospective at its Delhi space, titled ‘Gogi Saroj Pal: Mythic Femininities’, which will run till 25 May. This is the second show to celebrate the artist’s six-decade-long career, spanning the 1960s to the 2020s.
According to Ashish Anand, CEO and managing director, DAG, the show has been in the making since the beginning of 2023. Anand first met the artist in the 1990s, when he had started his journey in the art world.
“Outspoken in her opinions, her art reflected her humanitarian and feminist concerns. Hers is an important voice for the distinctive character and language, and she will be part of discussions on Indian art for a long time to come,” he says.
It might be helpful to read the catalogue and then view the exhibition. The essays by Delhi-based curator Roobina Karode and writer-activist Urvashi Butalia are insightful, offering moments of discovery to the reader.
The realisation that most of interviews in the catalogue were among the last given by Pal before her demise make them even more precious.
Butalia forged a deep friendship with the artist in the last four months of her life and met Pal several times. She remembers the artist as someone “bursting with life with a glint in her eyes; someone who was full of humour, having the ability to laugh at herself”, despite being in tremendous pain.
Ved Nayar, her partner and fellow artist, notes in his essay: “I saw her struggle a lot in life but not once did I see her give up, lose hope or motivation, such was her incredible spirit.”
Pal’s health was never perfect—an unsuccessful ear surgery often left her dizzy, causing her to have falls, one of which fractured her hipbone in 2008. This occurred within less than a decade of her losing her only child from her first marriage, Marish, who met with a fatal road accident in Bengaluru, on the day when he was set to have his very first exhibition as an artist. The viewing of her art, in the context of such severe loss and grief, becomes all the more poignant.
A LIFETIME OF ART
The retrospective, showing 50-plus works from her illustrious career, is divided into nine categories. They feature early still-life works done in the 1960s as an art student, self-portraits from the late 1980s, and works from famous series such as Relationships and Young Monks, which navigated the emotional connect between people and animals.
Most compelling, of course, are her works that celebrate women and talk about feminist identities, agency—or the lack of it, patriarchy, domesticity, misogyny. This is where works such as Being a Woman, Nayika, HathyoginiKali, Aagka Dariya and Mahasnan acquire critical importance.
Hathyogini-Kali sculptures in fibreglass,done in the last three years of her life, bear witness to the restless spirit of the artist. Then there’s Kinnari, her series from the 1990s, which evolved into another series, Kinnari Mantras, after Pal was bedridden in 2008. The protagonist, a mythical winged creature portrayed as part-bird, part-woman, is seen by art critics as an abiding symbol of feminine freedom in Indian art.
Pal was deeply interested in Buddhist philosophy and Hindu mythology. In her work, she referred to myths and legends, and interpreted them through a feminist lens .
The decorative wings in Pal’s painted kinnaris became a symbol of liberation. Both the series reveal the artist’s response to her own physical limitations.
The legs of the figures, curator Roobina Karode notes in her essay, resembled Pal’s own immobile torso: “The legs (like her own) remained attenuated, weak and lifeless, disproportionate to the body, which experienced a sense of being awkwardly deformed and being constrained.”
Pal belonged to a family of freedom fighters, and grew up in a household that valued women’s rights. Her grandmother was a feminist in Lahore, who also ran a rehabilitation centre and home for orphaned children. The fight for justice came naturally to Pal.
THE ARTIST’S WORDS
In her last interview to DAG, the artist spoke about making preparatory notes for her uncle, Yashpal Singh’s book Jhoota Sach, rated even today as one of the most important books on the Partition.
In 2009, her own book, Phulkari, a collection of short stories in Hindi was published shortly after she painted her series All These Flowers Are For You. The paintings showed forlorn female figures in bright floral scarves or dupattas. n the book’s foreword, Pal observes that the art of embroidering phulkari is liberating—not only does it allow women to congregate together to discuss their everyday trials, but the fabric also allows a woman to wipe away her tears when she is alone and sad.
According to Anand, Pal’s art continues to appeal, particularly to women collectors.
Butalia concurs and says that Pal’s works will continue to influence the discourse in feminism. Her work should also be seen as the triumph of an artist who wanted to correct all that was wrong in the society, particularly with respect to women. She created from her imagination, as well as everyday scenes at home and leisure, to visualise gender discrimination in society.
Along with that, her works continue to show how creativity can effectively transform grief, anger, and sadness into a healing journey. “When I paint, I do not feel the pain. My body ceases to exist,” is what Pal often said about her art. Her rich body of art is a testament to that.
How sexy can a qualifying tennis tournament in New York be? When the on-court drama involves Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, the answer turns out to be quite a bit more than your average USTA singles match in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers.
“The ball is the ephemeral, invisible force of desire,” says Guadagnino, the director of Call Me By Your Name.” “I wanted to show desire going back and forth.” Challengers, which releases in theatres on Friday, takes the melodrama of the threesome and gives it a breathless, bi-curious spin. That’s especially due to the multilateral chemistry between Zendaya, O’Connor and Faist — all actors in their late 20s or early 30s.
It’s a big-screen statement especially for Zendaya, who’s also a producer on the film. She plays Tashi, the wife and coach of tennis superstar Art (Faist, the West Side Story breakout). Tashi was only relegated to the sidelines because of a career-ending knee injury — though it did little to sap her ambition. When Art, whose passion for tennis is fading, is matched in New Rochelle against an old friend, Patrick (O’Connor, star of Alice Rohrwacher’s recent La Chimera ), their complicated past is, deliciously, resurrected.
“What’s special is that the three of us got to lead the movie. That is cool,” says O’Connor. “An opportunity to do something like that is so rare.” “Sometimes I’ve been a part of big ensembles,” adds Zendaya. “But it’s just the three of us. We are the cast. While we obviously have other amazing actors that contribute, this is the core thing here. Tennis training and the rehearsal period, it was just us. So thank god that we like each other.”
Guadagnino, known for his organic way of working, compares the weeks he and the three stars spent together preparing in Boston to “kids on the beach creating castles of sand.” Though Faist has some ability, the rest were hopeless at tennis. Guadagnino hadn’t picked up a racquet in his life before stepping onto the set in Challengers. Famed tennis coach Brad Gilbert was brought in to help.
But Challengers isn’t really about tennis, that’s just the arena where attraction and emotion in the film ultimately spills out. When it’s pointed out to Guadagnino that the tennis scenes are essentially his movie’s sex scenes, he responds, “Thank you.”
For Zendaya, Faist and O’Connor, Challengers allowed them to, when not busy steaming up the screen, wrestle with their own ambitions. O’Connor shot La Chimera—playing a character he more closely identified with—in between a very different role in Challengers.
“He is front-footed, he’s overly confident — all these qualities that I’ve always admired and always wanted that I’ve never quite been able to have. Just to play it and be in his shoes for a few months was bliss,” says O’Connor. “That’s what I’ll hold on to with Patrick. I really like Patrick. I know he’s problematic but I really like him. I find him hilarious and charming and he knows himself. And those are all qualities that I don’t necessarily have but I admire in him.”
Her work continues to show how creativity can effectively transform grief, anger, and sadness into a healing journey