Sangram Majumdar:
Choreographed Gestures
Ambika Trasi
Sangram Majumdar’s paintings center on forms culled from gestures. Informed by his palimpsestuous perspective, the artist considers corporeal arrangements that are often enacted in the everyday, which hearken back to iconic gestures found in myths, religious and historical iconography, art, and mass-media. He mines numerous artistic traditions for his source material. He sifts through archives to consider the latent possibilities of “dead” compositions, such as sketches of planned Indian miniatures that were never turned into paintings (perhaps even considered to be “failures”) or the outlined remnants of faded frescoes. Deconstructing and reviving the shapes and outlines from a trove of cultural material, he rearranges them on his canvases to create new choreographies out of the parts.
Majumdar uses the composition to reflect on his own positionality as an artist whose foundations are made up of numerous traditions that are assigned different value systems in a colonized art world
the meeting, 2022, oil on canvas, 198.1 x 160 cm / 78 x 63 in
In the meeting (2022), Majumdar uses Gustave Courbet’s painting The Meeting as a sort of inflection point. While Courbet rendered an allegory of an artist’s relationship to a patron to consider class differences and the double-consciousness of the artist (or Courbet’s own self-awareness) about his place and power in society, Majumdar uses the composition to reflect on his own positionality as an artist whose foundations are made up of numerous traditions that are assigned different value systems in a colonized art world. In Majumdar’s the meeting (2022), the lines and limbs of figurative works from Courbet’s painting to South Asian Madhubani art, come together to meet and assess each other on the canvas. They exist on the plane laterally; neither tradition is privileged over the other. The canvas becomes a space for one to engage with the various materials simultaneously, in a kind of third space, where “the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity and fixity.”1
It is a practice of staying invested in his chosen imagery and using it in new ways with each work to examine its exhaustive outcomes
before the meeting, 2023, oil on canvas, 198.1 x 160 cm / 78 x 63 in
Majumdar documented his painting the meeting (2022), while it was still in progress, and used the photo as a template for his subsequent work, before the meeting (2023). In the latter, the artist reenacts his hand, recreating the unfinished work to study his own painterly process. Here, he revives brushstrokes that he ultimately chose to cover up in the meeting (2022). These gestures float and appear sketchy, expressing an indeterminacy. Meanwhile, the central device in Courbet’s painting – the outstretched hands of the artist and patron – are reproduced and scattered across the canvas (though in Majumdar’s painting, the hands belong to Brown figures). The hands are altered slightly with each rendering. before the meeting (2023) is a painting of a rehearsal. Majumdar’s continued incorporation of certain brush marks and lines is an exercise of endurance. It is a practice of staying invested in his chosen imagery and using it in new ways with each work to examine its exhaustive outcomes. The elements on the canvas may be rechoreographed and performed again.
Unlike traditional choreographic drawings, which are diagrammatic, Majumdar uses painting to (re)configure the shapes and outlines of gestures to explore their inherent multivalence. As Katja Heitmann states, “The gesture is the vocabulary and the choreography is the grammar.”2 Majumdar’s paintings take on a similar function as choreographic objects do – a term coined by William Forsythe to refer to the performative objects, installations, and interactive sculptures of his own creation. When participants engage with Forsythe’s objects, they become acutely aware of how their movements resonate within their bodies. He writes:
“Choreography elicits action upon action: the method of deriving methods. It presents an environment of grammatical rule governed by exception, a state of contradiction that exists in visible complicity with each successive abdication of a past definition. The intricate global history of choreography proposes an exemplary ecology of procedural valences that exhibits no preference for any one particular model of manifestation.” 3
Forsythe considers choreography to be a medium that encourages repurposing its own historical grammar, not to critique the artform, but to explore all of its boundless possibilities and “abstracted manifestations…to alter the condition of the concepts incumbent in the acts, and to lend them distinct, atypical prominence.”4
A common act of care morphs into a more abstract representation of a feeling
For Majumdar, a quotidian gesture might suddenly open a portal to a familiar narrative. A moment where he bends down to remove a splinter from his daughter’s foot might conjure the story of Krishna plucking a thorn from Radha’s foot in his mind’s eye. The gesture then turns into an afterimage, or ghost-image, that shifts in color and form with every blink after one is exposed to the original picture. In examining the shifts between Majumdar’s paintings, reperformers 1; reperformers 2; phantom echoes; reconstructing; and piecing (all 2023), the physical gesture at the center of the works – a hand removing a thorn from another’s foot – is lifted from the initial autobiographical event and then distanced from any narrative or art historical contexts to become something purely elemental and primordial. A common act of care morphs into a more abstract representation of a feeling, akin to Audre Lorde’s considerations of the erotic, “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”5 For the artist, each subsequent painting that explores the same gesture is a turn of the kaleidoscope, a visual play or riff on the previous study, that transforms the composition further to uncover something new each time. It is a deciduous process of shedding and (re)growing, wherein some semblance of the primary gesture remains but becomes disassociated from its primary origins. In doing so, he captures the liminality between potential and kinetic energies, and the way in which a physical gesture might store a “bloc of sensation.” 6
monster mashup, 2022, oil on canvas, 198.1 x 160 cm / 78 x 63 in
Bodies are specifically arranged to reveal, uphold, and undermine power structures in ancient and Classical painting. Majumdar’s compositions ask his viewers to question and complicate the easy “hero” and “villain” binaries found in religious iconography, Indian miniatures, historical paintings, films, video games, and broadcast news. monster mashup (2022) and monster mashup 2 (2023) use the form of the mythical demon, Ravana, killed by Ram in the epic, Ramayana. Shape, shadow, and pattern conceal and protect the monster, who breaks out of the parergonal frame in each painting. The works consider the dangers of visibility for a being that is demonized and marginalized by a prevalent, supremacist narrative. For Ravana, turning monstrous might be an act of resistance, like Bhanu Kapil’s Laloo – a cyborg, girl, mother, child, immigrant on a road trip through the American landscape in Incubation: a space for monsters – who is “that being who refuses to adapt to her circumstances.”7 Majumdar invites the viewer to unlearn persistent hegemonies and empathize with the vulnerable monster.
The artist plays with its basic template, refiguring the shapes and outlines by rendering them as more splintered or softened. He applies color across his canvas in swaths like stained glass and frames the figures with a theater curtain above them, presenting an open-ended narrative that can be reread endlessly
in being here, 2023, oil on canvas, 198.1 x 119.3 cm / 78 x 47 in
In Kalighat painting, the same basic composition may be used to explore distinct relationships. One iconic composition in the tradition depicts two side-by-side figures: one who stands upright, beside another who kneels on the ground. Variations on the composition include a woman courtesan standing while her lover touches her feet; a woman holding a broom threateningly over her head while a man presents her with a rose. In another, the kneeling man bows his head, ready to take the blow. In another, a woman kneels, washing the feet of a priest. The near-identical arrangement of two bodies on a plane yield different dynamics rooted in gender, caste, and class structures. The signifiers change how one might read the relationship between the two figures: as loving, submissive, authoritarian, or abusive. The composition is an unstable container for a pathos formula shifting from devotional, to sexual, to humorous, to oppressive. As critic and art historian Rachel Haidu states, “Shapes don’t have to conceal their own figural pushiness – the way they ask you to see a knobby joint or a flattening breast. They live in their own ambivalence: that, at least, is where “modernism” caves under its own dogma and lets us see something less authored, both about our histories and about ourselves.”8 Majumdar’s paintings by attending to (2023) and in being here (2023) consider the many readings of this particular Kalighat composition. The artist plays with its basic template, refiguring the shapes and outlines by rendering them as more splintered or softened. He applies color across his canvas in swaths like stained glass and frames the figures with a theater curtain above them, presenting an open-ended narrative that can be reread endlessly.
by attending to, 2023, oil on canvas, 198.1 x 137.1 cm / 78 x 54 in
In Majumdar’s works, hands are not only indexical—they are also self-referential
Brush marks and lines are gestures in and of themselves: evidence of the body, its expressions, and its emotional and creative capacities. Majumdar’s brushstrokes are like echoes of a performance. He reenacts physical movements that stem from his memory, and replicates decisions on the canvas previously made by himself or other artists before him. His ubiquitous renderings of hands in his paintings consider the body part’s inextricable link to labor and artmaking. The artist arranges the hands to denote acts of care or harm, resistance, and protest. They also nod to foundational forms of art making, from handprints found in cave paintings to early childhood finger painting. In Majumdar’s works, hands are not only indexical—they are also self-referential. They implore his viewers to pay attention to how his paintings are constructed. They present artistic production “in all of its entangled institutional limitations and aesthetic utopias.”9
If gestures that hold such a fixed place in our bodies and memories can be destabilized and turned mutable through the act of painting, then how might we be able to reimagine the power dynamics and oppressive systems we contend with in our world? By slowly unbinding gestures from their histories and narratives and refiguring them into new choreographies, Majumdar offers us a prompt to construct new ecosystems out of the framework. His works offer a pathos formula of unlearning and liberation, a bloc of sensation that resonates like Frantz Fanon’s final prayer: “O my body, make me always a man who questions!”10
Ambika Trasi is an artist, writer, and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her research-based practice considers the coloniality of power within images and sites. She has curated exhibitions including, Salman Toor: How Will I Know at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2020); A Space for Monsters at Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia (2021); and recent solo exhibitions for Maya Varadaraj and Abir Karmakar at Aicon Contemporary, New York (2023). Trasi has recently exhibited her work at Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, and Heroes Gallery, New York. She has presented lecture-performances at Asia Art Archive in America, Brooklyn; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; and HANGAR - Centro de Investigação Artística, Lisbon. Her writing has been featured in Clay Pop, published by Rizzoli; and by the Whitney Museum of American Art; IBRAAZ Journal for Contemporary Visual Culture in North Africa and the Middle East; Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas Journal; and Arcade Project Zine. She has a BFA from New York University.
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1 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 37.
2 Zoey Poll, “Everyday Gestures, Turned Into Art,” New York Times, January 8, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/arts/dance/gesture-archive-art.html.
3 William Forsythe, “Choreographic Objects: Essay,” William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects, October 18, 2023, https://www.williamforsythe.com/essay.html.
4 Ibid.
5 Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Sexualities And Communication, (London: Sage Publications), 88.
6 In their book What Is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write, “the aim of art is to… wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations,
a pure being of sensations.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, “Percept,Affect,and Concept” in What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 167.
7 Bhanu Kapil, “Notes on Monsters: Section 2 (Wish)” in Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006).
8 Rachel Haidu, “Some Thoughts About Shape” in Shapes: The OG, Vol #14: Spring 2020, Editors: Amy Sillman p. 104, https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/magazine/amysillmanfitfile.pdf.
9 Achim Hochdörfer, “A HIDDEN RESERVE: PAINTING FROM 1958 TO 1965” in Artform, Vol. 47, No. 6, February 2009, 159.
10 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks. (London: Pluto Press, 1967), 220.