OFF THE GRID

Visual artist Debjani Bhardwaj, who spends her time between Dubai, Muscat and New Delhi, tells Sangeetha Sagar about drawing with a knife, creating magical worlds through paper cuttings, and giving ancient UAE folktales a modern twist

Artist Debjani Bhardwaj tells us how she makes flimsy pieces of paper seem like imposing, solid statues.

What led you to the craft of paper cutting? The thread that weaves through my art practice is drawing. Over the years I’ve explored relief printmaking, which involves drawing on and cutting into linoleum and wood. In 2012 this led me to cut paper to render a certain lacelike fragility to the drawings. That was addictive. Papercutting is essentially drawing with a knife, patiently, adding to a piece by subtracting from it. It involves taking away and taking away until only what is really relevant is left behind.

You incorporate elements of Emirati and Omani stories – what do these add to your art? Folktales are accounts by people of their own experiences and cultural knowledge rather than descriptions by people from the outside looking in. They are key methods through which cultural knowledge and wisdom are passed on through generations. I was inspired to look at these ancient tales through a modern lens and transfer some of these stories from a verbal to a visual medium. My non-linear stories are visually seductive, inviting the viewer to look beyond the surface and read between the lines. My idea was to revive an interest in these forgotten tales.

Folk tales from the Middle East were not merely narrated to amuse and entertain but are also instructive moral tales, intended to teach important life lessons to the younger generation.

Paper is not the first thing you think of when you hear ‘art’. Why did you choose this medium to work with?

The current artistic revival and interest in working with cut paper stems from a type of artist who loves to draw, and also loves shape and solidity. They do not want to get tied down by the weight of sculpting or the complexity of painting. Here is an artist who wants to freely explore a material so light and fragile and easy to work with, which he or she can create small worlds as light as our lives are themselves. I like the challenge of working with sparse, ubiquitous materials like paper and a scalpel, where every line is intertwined and interconnected. However delicate these flimsy pieces of paper are, they seem solid like concrete statues.

I was interested in the dichotomy between the fragile beauty of the medium and the edginess of the message that folktales convey. This is similar to folktales that are transient and might get altered slightly with every act of retelling, like a game of Chinese Whispers.

You mention ‘fantastical figures of your childhood’ in your art. What characters have you explored?

I grew up in India surrounded by various tales from Hindu mythology, featuring many fantastical beings. The imagery of hybrids

I grew up looking at are embedded in my subconscious mind and influence my drawings. At the centre of all these myths is the universal truth – beneath our intelligence and emotional capacity, we are ultimately animals. The hybrids in my work represent the humanity in animals or animality in humans and are metaphors for a social world tuned bestial and violent.

The Omani and Emirati folk tales I researched

are full of djinns – hybrid creatures that are neither all good or evil, but often provide the element of unpredictability to stories. They may reward the protagonist, or unfairly punish them. They appear in my artworks.

What do you seek to convey through your art? That things are not as they seem to be. I am interested to explore the invisible and look beneath the surface.

My narratives contain contradictions and multiple realities. They appear cheerful and childlike at first glance, but on closer inspection might result in feelings of ambiguity, discomfort and menace. They may be exquisite yet grotesque, might appear harmless and yet be potentially dangerous.

I am interested in fragmentary moments that are too incidental to be a grand narrative. These narratives lie in the gaps, in the slippery state of in betweenness where nothing is true and everything is possible.

Do you obsess over your art?

I have my fallow periods but when I work on a project, I research, breathe and live the concept until I exhaust all possibilities within it.

What is your favourite piece of work so far? Lost in a Djinn Forest. I have explored light and shadows in this intricate papercut work creating larger-than-life characters.

And the most complex?

All the works in the [Tashkeel] exhibition were challenging because I had never attempted these before. But the most complex is titled Tricksters, Aliens and Shape Shifters . It is an interactive wooden toy inspired by the game I used to play as a child. It involved developing four characters from the folk tales I researched. The piece has 12 movable faces hand-drawn on wood and each of the faces fits into the others. There are many possible permutations and combinations. Designing this piece was like making a puzzle and I had to solve the puzzle myself first.

Your advice to aspiring artists?

Aim to find your own unique artistic voice. It requires long arduous walks on treacherous paths until you discover your true motivations. Artisnotonlyabouttheaestheticsorperfecting techniques but more importantly about what you are trying to say. Once you know what to say you will discover how to say it effectively.

Tashkeel’s ‘Telling Tales’, a solo exhibition by Debjani Bhardwaj, runs until October 30 at its gallery in

Nad Al Sheba