Living a peripatetic life that took her to China, South Africa, Switzerland, Australia and more, Devi Seetharam developed an eye for gender relationships and sociocultural spaces. As the daughter of an Indian diplomat, she travelled to a variety of places and invariably cultivated the desire to be cognizant of her surroundings. From renting an artist studio in Parslow Street studios in Clifton Hill, Melbourne, between 2016 and 2021, Kerala-born Seetharam eventually returned to Bengaluru to set up her studio in an old three-storeyed apartment in Cox Town in 2023. A series of porcelain vases aligned on a brown glass cupboard, a plethora of paint brushes on a table, and a thick bunch of eclectic art books, along with the artworks adorning the walls and works in progress, inevitably carry a hint of her cosmopolitan self.
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Growing up as a third culture kid, Seetharam says, “I would actively avoid visual cues that would tie my works to a certain region, history or narrative. The attempt was to focus on human relatability despite our varied backgrounds.” Gradually this changed over time when her personal subjectivities, including identity and politics, started to underwrite the artistic practices. As the terms—home, belonging, femininity, patriarchy, occupation—swiftly punctuated Seetharam’s response to the places she lived in, the sartorial style became a leitmotif to articulate a visual language that aligns with her conceptual thought. Seetharam has taken extensive photographs to document men at the places of social interactions be it devotional houses or political gatherings. Subsequently, the paintings populated with mundus (white garments with golden borders worn around the waist) are a reconfiguration of the men seized in the frames of photographs.
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In the hands of Seetharam, the mundu— ubiquitous with Malayali men—in the series “Brothers, Fathers and Uncles”, as well as the absence of facial features, acts as a gentle nudge to delineate the agency enjoyed by men in public spaces. The dominant mundu—accentuated by the ripples of its drapes and dimension of its circumference—is juxtaposed with petite flowers scattered around it. The contrast between the two visual elements draws attention to the gender disparity in terms of accessibility to common areas. In the series, the lower half of the body carries all the details she wants to emphasize. “Including faces would only distract by making them distinguishable from one another, causing them to be seen as individuals rather than as a collective consciousness,” says the artist.
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The wall-sized paintings were also a part of her last solo exhibition with Lon Gallery at Sydney Contemporary in September 2024. With a BFA in painting from Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore, in 2011, Seetharam has found herself returning to a reductive technique of painting through the years. “I kept adding paint, then rubbing, scraping and eventually sanding away the paint. This last step stirred me, and over the years I have evolved my technique”. The reductive technique becomes an extension of her impetus to destabilize reductive gender norms. In a world ridden with the ideals of aesthetical beauty, Seetharam eschews the presence of any physiognomic characteristics to address the social power tensions represented in contemporary art.
