Fictional Characters of Afra Eisma in Textile Art Projects

Visual art has relied upon Visuals. What we see is the principal thing in visual art, and what we carry and sublimate also matters. Artwork can come anywhere, literature or folklore, a song or resistance, political uprising and revolution. Any event can stimulate artwork. What we see is a manifestation of other things.

An artist, Afra Eisma from Hague, exhibited her work in the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art as part of a group show titled ‘Very Small Feelings’, as part of a fourth exhibition of the Young Artists of Our Times series, in collaboration with Samdani Art Foundation, Co-curated by Akansha Rastogi and Dian Campbell with Ruxmini Coudhury, Avik Debdas and Swati Kumari.

Eisma starts to work with women’s literature and feminist writing from diverse cultural backgrounds. Afra Eisma uses Begum Rokeya (1880-1932), Audre Lorde (1934– 1992), and Ursula Kroeber Le Guin’s (1929– 2018) works and thoughts to reproduce the fictional characters as ‘out of the box’ art projects. How can these three writers and thinkers from different cultural backgrounds meet and reflect together? The meeting point of these three legendary women’, as of now, is Afra Eisma’s projects. Afra Eisma created her imaginary characters, which were made through ideas provoked by the writers she read.

We don’t know how Bengali feminist thinker, writer, educator, professor, teacher, and woman activist Begum Rokeya influenced or provoked Eisma to create fictional characters. Begum Rokeya was a political activity, especially for Muslim Girls from East Bengal, undivided Bengal in present-day Bangladesh. Which element Eisma bring from Audre Lorde is unknown and needs to be visible clearly. Audre Lorde was an American writer, womanist, radical feminist, professor, philosopher and civil rights activist, and declared herself black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, and poet. And Ursula Le Guin, known for her fiction fantasy series, writes over 20 novels and is celebrated much.

Artists Eisma puts these three legendary women writers and thinkers in an initial position of her creations, dialogues about unexplored regions of fictional characters in Textile medium, and allows the audience to engage in her work of art. Space is open in KNMA hall, occupied by the fictional characters of Eisma, which comes from fiction or reality that carries us into an actual area of ideas. The artist creates a space welcoming the audience to mingle with her works closely, touch the artwork, hold them for a moment, and take a selfie with them. Art is not always staying away from us; some we can carry, feel it. Afra Eisma creates a space of ‘body’ of works, which bring the ‘alien’ characters that are lost in anatomy or evolved in.

This project is based upon human experience where we can intertwine our limbs with those of otherwordly and alien beings, taking delight in the physical closeness of assembly and embrace as a core element of our life. Gathered on the floor, they are coloured and manipulated, telling the story of alien anatomy, elevated figures from a storyless air, which permits us to entangle in their embrace and engage in conversation with their worlds and worlds of other visitors and to imagine new worlds altogether.

Shared experience and mutual understanding are essential, especially in isolation and uncertainty. Responding to an increasing experience of uneasiness towards anything deemed extraneous to our familial environment, Eisma seeks to appease these maladies by and through art experience. Art experience is not something ‘outer’ body experience. That is also part of our ‘body’. Art is created as a body experience, which becomes an ‘outer’ body experience.

Using craft techniques in novel ways, Eisma explores and manifests personal stories through immersive and intimate installations of textiles, sculptures, and ceramics. Inspiring her works are characters or imaginary friends that interweave sensuality with lightheartedness, as noted in the artist’s statement.