One Moon, One Sun: Surpassing Duality to Achieve Wholeness in the Work of Tejswini Narayan Sonawane
Yasmín Martín Vodopivec
Women in India are an intimate part of nature,
both in imagination and in practice.
Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive, 1988
Since its founding, the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts has appointed an international jury to award the Grand Prize, which usually means that the winning artists have the opportunity to exhibit their work in a solo exhibition at the next edition of the Biennale. This traditional approach not only ensures continuity with the central theme of the previous Biennale, but also establishes closer and more lasting creative links between the prize-winning artists, museum staff and local audience.
Tejswini Narayan Sonawane was awarded the Grand Prize of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts in 2023. The Biennale edition, entitled From the void came the gifts of the cosmos, explored the restorative potential of art by examining both personal and collective trauma rooted in colonial processes and highlighting the complex effects of these processes on identity formation. It is within this context that the artist’s works from her two series of woodcuts on cloth, Femininity (2015) and A Migrant (2017), stood out for their fierce determination and strong poetic charge. They address various transformations of the self, on the one hand, when gender defines one’s freedoms, and on the other, when internalised inhibitions lead to a loss of autonomy.
At first glance, one might say that the works of Tejswini Narayan Sonawane contain many elements of fairytale or fable wherein humans and animals coexist and a complex narrative unfolds beneath which lies a moral conundrum that reveals universal aspects of human nature, although not always at its best. An omniscient narrator is present, who is also the protagonist, even though events are relayed through other characters. The comparison between the artist’s works and the fantasy narrative genre might be very convincing were it not for the constant reflection of the cruelty and harshness of an oppressive reality. Their moral lessons, too, often remain ambiguous.
A recurring motif in her works is the self-representation as a woman-bird figure who, in the company of other animals, frees herself from social constraints and male domination in order to realise her dream. She is depicted as a mythological being and her form merges with other animals that display anthropomorphic emotional traits, thus personifying the oppressed, all those who are denied the choice of their own existential fate.
The two-dimensionality and density of the voluminous figures with their refined, condensed patterns, which seem to float in an indeterminate, sometimes even celestial field of space and time, can make the artist’s works reminiscent of some of the sacred images from India. Similar to the Hindu pantheon, where the earthly incarnations of the gods often combine human and animal traits in order to resolve a specific problem or restore balance to the world, the artist creates her own avatar in an effort to deal with the patriarchal conditioning of everyday life.
The unique relationship that Tejswini Narayan Sonawane depicts in her works reveals the core notion that human and non-human beings are united and interconnected as if they were one and celebrates values such as empathy and social and interspecies cohesion. Although these images are full of beauty and poetic nuance, they also exude despair, helplessness and anger in their symbolic language, thereby moving away from idealisation; they avoid the naive interdependence between animals and women, which has contributed to perpetuating a heteropatriarchal ideology that objectifies both based on their perceived otherness and reduces them to lesser beings.
Since its beginnings in the 1970s, the ecofeminist movement has drawn attention to the connection between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature, arguing that the aim of such subjugation is to maintain a system of patriarchal domination that pursues interests aimed at the appropriation and exploitation of everything that is part of nature. Throughout its history, this movement has extended its efforts to other non-privileged social groups, while stressing the need to recognise the interconnectedness of various power structures that contribute to the preservation of androcentric violence.
Among the various perspectives that have emerged in this movement, the Indian perspective stands out. Based on Hindu mythology and Indian philosophy, it is distinguished for having introduced a holistic view of spirituality and womanhood. Mother Earth (or the Mother Goddess) represents the embodiment of the feminine divine and, through the feminine principle, is responsible for creating life and providing nourishment. Quite distant from other ecofeminist orientations, which follow a more binary, rigid and hierarchical view of the world around us, this version assumes that life in all its forms originates from the feminine principle and that there is, therefore, no division either between human and nature or between man and woman.
The celestial bodies mentioned in the title of this exhibition, the Moon and the Sun, are regarded in astrology and various mystical traditions as cosmic forces that affect human life. Often referred to as a pair of opposites, they symbolise duality and dissonance (day and night, light and dark, masculine and feminine), which are intrinsically linked to human experience. In the context of Hinduism, such dualities must be experienced and transcended in order to attain a deeper understanding of the world, unity among all beings, and spiritual liberation.
The exhibition One Moon, One Sun proposes an interruption to the domination of binary thinking in order to move away from patterns of oppression and embrace otherness as a complementary element of wholeness. From this viewpoint, we can imagine and cultivate different, more inclusive and authentic relationships, thereby re-evaluating the behavioural parameters we have followed, knowingly or unknowingly, until now.
SOURCES
Érika Carcaño Valencia, “Ecofeminismo y ambientalismo feminista. Una reflexión crítica”, in: Argumentos (Méx.), vol. 21, no. 56, 2008, pp. 183–188, https://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0187-57952008000100010.
Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, ed. Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, Bloomsbury Publishing, USA, 2014.
Iz praznine so prišli darovi kozmosa / From the void came the gifts of the cosmos, exhibition catalogue of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Slovenian and English edition, International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, 2023.
Las mujeres que inventaron el arte indio, ed. Eva Fernández del Campo and Sergio Román Aliste, Ediciones Asimétricas, Madrid, 2021, https://www.amazon.com/MUJERES-INVENTARON-INDIO-Pr%C3%B3xima-aparici%C3%B3n/dp/8417905952.
Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, Zed Books, London, 1988.
Dr. Sujata Roy Abhijah, “Women and Nature: Locating Ecofeminism in Indian Context”, Indica Today, 12. 6. 2023, https://www.indica.today/research/conference/women-and-nature-locating-ecofeminism-in-indian-context/.