East, west and all that lies in between

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Vinita Karim has traversed the path of the sun. She was born in Burma and spent time living around the subcontinent in Islamabad, New Delhi and Dhaka, studying economics and art in Stockholm and travelling across Europe, before finding herself in Manila, at the far reaches of the eastern hemisphere. Her travels across cultures and communities find their way into her work in ways both tangible and intangible. Her “well-travelled” paintings are now on display at Gallery Point of View, a contemporary art gallery in Mumbai, where they will remain until June 10.
Karim revels in abstraction. Her landscapes are personal figurations of the world that passes before her eyes. Papyrus, gold lead, recycled newsprint – elements of the worlds she has inhabited populate her canvases. Sometimes, they almost seem like debris, like flotsam that drifts from one imagined urban space to another. In other places, they are fundamental to the existence of her landscapes. In Reclaimed Settlements, a shell-like translucence is panoramically splayed across the upper half of the painting. Its multi-hued monotony is relieved by a bold strip of warm tones that horizontally cut the whiteness into two. Triangular forms, rather sail-like, drift aimlessly in the lower half of the painting, invoking the idea of trapped, rudderless beings stuck in limbo.
Karim has been exhibiting her work in group and solo shows for two decades now. Her work has travelled to galleries in Asia, Africa and Europe. With each new sojourn, she adds elements and experiences to her repository of “urbanscapes”. She started out as a figurative painter, but eventually found she was attracted to abstract realism and the poignant expressive quality that is peculiar to it.
Copper Rain, one of her works, truly exploits the idea of panoramic vision and its relevance to urban situations. It is a horizontal, six-panelled piece where yellowing chrome vistas, the colour of sand, pervade the canvas. Disjointed forms lurk at its peripheries; the sky is lined with tower-like forms, sketchy yet real, a world precipitating at the edge of disaster.
Karim’s work thrives on abstract realism, originating from lived realities and contributing to those realities by generating questions or viewing them through the lens of her imagination. She is clear about her strong grounding in contemporary times. “It is an artist’s job to observe the world around them to represent current issues,” she remarks.
Then there is Marooned, where the insistent glint of gold beckons you from its unassuming perch under a boat-like form, the object. The centrality of this object is underlined by bold black lines that define its form; the black also criss-crosses it aggressively, almost wanting to cancel it out and deny its presence. The unevenness of the landscape reinforces the painting’s dominant overtones of instability and tension.
Karim completed her post-graduate degree in Fine Arts at the University of Philippines. Her masters’ thesis, Artmasala, was a postmodern conceptual installation that used 700 metres of fabric hand-dyed by using dried flowers and spices. Using fluid lengths of cloth that flapped around the gallery, Karim hoped to embody the “borderless world of constant information flux and flow that characterises life today”. Karim’s migratory pattern of living is reflected and cited by the combination of colours and spices that she picked to dye the fabrics. Even the presence of globalisation is seen in her work, with three huge wooden spools anchoring the fabric that rolls off them — in these spools, she sees the “machinery of globalisation, or the chakra of life”.
Texture and smell also play an important role in this installation, making it a sensorial experience that goes beyond what is purely visual.