Chatterjee & Lal

Autobiography of a Line:
The Photographs, Prints and Paper Cutouts of Nasreen Mohamedi

Curated by Sasha Altaf

Imagination fills a space with spirit and meaning. Reciprocally, that space evokes then feeling, memory, thought – giving it form.

Taking from Gaston Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics of Space’, 1958 – an interrogation into the meaning of spaces which preoccupy poetry (both intimate spaces and those of wide expansion) – this exhibition attempts to trace the reception of the poetic image in Nasreen Mohamedi’s photographs, prints and paper cut outs. In these works, the artist employed ideas around space as well as demonstrating the importance to her practice of experimentation with line and form.

Whether or not Mohamedi saw herself as a photographer, her practice can be linked by what, at times, might seem like an  impulse into opening up a multiplicity of photographic worlds of her own making. Whilst sometimes this involved focusing on the built environment, the artist concurrently took another approach towards a minimalist aesthetics of constructing or documenting abstracted photographic geometries.

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937 – 1990)

Mohamedi was born in Karachi, raised in Bombay and completed her studies in London in Paris. The artist began teaching at MSU, Baroda in 1972. Whilst primarily remembered today for her works on paper, there has been increasing scholarly interest in her photographic work. Since Mohamedi never exhibited these works in her lifetime, exhibitions of her photography have been very rare, and ‘Autobiography of a Line’ marks a first in Indian exhibition history.