“mould the wing to match the photograph” draws on the archive of Mrinalini Mukherjee, one of the most prominent sculptors in India, known for her experimentation with form and materiality over her forty-year practice. It stages an encounter between Pari (1986), the artist’s monumental hemp fibre sculpture, and archival materials with detailed installation instructions and extensive photographic documentation of Pari and similar works. The archival materials complicate the sculpture’s sense of organicity and intuitiveness, and demonstrate a desire for precision and control. The exhibition emphasises how the archive actively reconfigures the understanding and experience of Mukherjee’s work.
Note from the Curators
“mould the wing to match the photograph” stems from our immersion in Mrinalini Mukherjee’s personal archive as part of the digitising process at AAA in India’s office. The exhibition materialises simmering internal lunchtime debates about how Mukherjee’s digitised archive would and could alter and disrupt our perceptions of the artist’s practice.
Mukherjee’s extensive photo-documentation of her own work allowed us a certain closeness to her sculptures without direct physical proximity. As we scanned contact sheets, one after another, we noticed subtle shifts in angles through the repetitive and seemingly compulsive way in which she reassessed her sculptures through photography. The singular was multiplied to the point of being overwhelming, the forms constantly whirring in our minds. An animation experiment enabled us to express the seriality of the still images, where the artist appears as a spectre for just a moment, adjusting a fold.
Another exploratory mode was through 35mm slides, viewed in our prop-up lightbox, where the monumental was experienced as microscopic. This formal apparatus allowed us to distort scale, to zoom in and out, and to forge a strange kind of intimacy.
A lingering thread in the exhibition began during a heated debate among the curatorial team about the absence of preparatory sketches, drawings, maps, or blueprints that could shed light on how Mukherjee planned and executed her sculptures. How did she create such monumental sculptures of intricate symmetry without any measurements or demonstrative notes? This led us to scant interviews and lecture notes where Mukherjee describes her practice as “intuitive,” “improvised,” and “something which grows in all directions”—hence, perhaps, explaining why her preparatory process cannot be seen in the archive.
And yet, one thing we did find in the archive—for the already completed sculptures—was a set of highly codified installation instructions. This finding conveys a different and unexpected sensibility, with the works carefully annotated and measured to the centimetre. Made by her then-husband and late architect, Ranjit Singh, on Mukherjee’s instruction, these were used in the absence of the artist to install her works.
The archive also led us to speculate about the references and research behind her works. A large set of photo-documents of her extensive travels to art historical and cultural sites, across Asia and beyond, revealed Mukherjee’s consistent preoccupation with the forms and motifs that appear in her works. The organising of an archive is not orderly nor linear, and we worked on these images alongside photographs of her works-in-progress from her studios in New Delhi. The armature of the sculptures began resembling the arches of temple ruins, and suddenly we could see the way the overgrowing roots of Angkor Wat extended as tendrils in her effigies, while the folds of the moving Kathakali body seemed to shape the wings of her works.
The title of our exhibition, “mould the wing to match the photograph,” is borrowed from Mukherjee’s installation instructions, and evokes the kind of back-and-forth that occurs between an artwork and the reproducible digitised archive. In this imperative statement, Mukherjee marks her precise vision, and yet every time the artwork, and now, the archive, are circulated and presented, they are moulded and shaped anew.
—Noopur Desai, Pallavi Arora, and Samira Bose
Public Programmes
Date: Wed–Fri, 20–22 Sep 2023
Venue: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive
Workshop | Somatic Movement Workshop by David Leung
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2023
Venue: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive
Talk | Inter-Archives Conversations: Instructions as Archival Documents
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2023
Venue: Zoom
Workshop | Workshop led by Paola Sinisterra, Textile Specialist at Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2023
Venue: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive
Talk | The Artwork and Its Image: A Dialogue between Sculpture and Photography
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2024
Venue: Zoom
Performance | Performance by Movana Chen
Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2024
Venue: CCG Library, Asia Art Archive
Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) was a prolific sculptor based in New Delhi, India. Best known for her monumental sculptures in fibre, ceramic, and bronze, Mukherjee was trained in painting and mural design at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, India (1965–72), and studied sculpture at the West Surrey College of Art and Design, UK (1978). Mukherjee received a fellowship from the Government of India in 1981 to practice at Garhi Studios in Delhi, where she worked recurrently till the early 2000s. She participated in various residencies, most notably at European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands, in 1996 and 2000. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at La Biennale di Venezia (2022); Met Breuer, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala (2018); Dhaka Art Summit (2018); Camden Art Centre (2016); National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2015); 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014); Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (1996); and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1994). Mukherjee’s work is collected by public institutions including British Museum, London; Cleveland Museum of Art; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London, and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
“mould the wing to match the photograph” is curated by Noopur Desai, Pallavi Arora, and Samira Bose of Asia Art Archive in India, with support from Christopher K. Ho, Crystal Li, Özge Ersoy, Paul C. Fermin, Rebecca Tso, Ruby Weatherall, and Sneha Ragavan.
“mould the wing to match the photograph” is generously supported by Mimi Brown & Alp Erçil, and Virginia & Wellington Yee. The Mrinalini Mukherjee Archive was made possible with the support of the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation. We would like to extend our gratitude to the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, for loaning us Pari (1986) for this exhibition.
