Rites of Time

Arpana Caur enjoys painting what she refers to as ‘dualities’, and the concept of day and night marking the passage of time is familiar to her viewers. In Rites of Time, she uses embroiderers wielding a thread and a pair of scissors, respectively, in the context of time and its destruction.

In this painting, prakriti, or nature, embroiders all creation, here featured as the dance of life by way of the familiar form of folk dancers typified in Warli folk paintings, while mankind uses violence to create weapons of destruction to destroy life, ‘cutting trees and forests ruthlessly’.

‘I started making deliberate use of folk motifs in some of my works about twenty years ago as a homage to my brothers and sisters born by accident of birth in a village,’ she says, ‘while I was born in the capital of the country.’ This dichotomy plays out, according to her, in the way we view art as ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’. The yantra in one corner of the painting too is a homage to the country’s tradition of tantric art which manifests visually as a symbol of creation and destruction. ‘I have always attempted to blend the old with the new,’ Caur says—as is only too evident in this outstanding painting.