Press Articles

City Press Sunday 09.06.2010
Piecing it together

Artist’s deeply moving solo exhibition depicts journey of healing and discovery, writes Ferial Haffajee

When Amita Makan’s mum came to visit her in Pretoria in September 2002, she brought two gifts: a heart shaped silver jewelery box and two sepia-tinted studio photographs taken in the style of the 60s.

That gift formed the basis of a deeply moving solo exhibition that Makan will launch at the KZNSA Gallery on Tuesday.

By 2002, Alzheimers was stalking Vasanti Makan, wreaking havoc with her memory and dexterity. “I’ve now realized that my mother’s preoccupation with safeguarding the photographs was borne out of her own awareness that she was losing herself “ says in her catalogue of the exhibition called Evanescence.

In turn, she has turned the photographs, which reflect the Bollywood-like beauty of her mum, and her art into a journey of healing and discovery.

“My mother was a courageous, strong and vivacious woman. From the time of her marriage, at the age of 17, she wore beautiful, brightly coloured saris which were strongly tied to her identity and sense of self. She draped her 6m saris with great finesse, and in a nonchalant manner.

“As the disease relentlessly imposed itself, her sari began to hang lopsidedly over her body”.

In various works of oil on canvas and embroidered silk and canvas, Makan turns the two photographs into arts of remembrance for her mother and healing for herself.

“Over the years, I painstakingly put my mother back together with my painting and embroidery”, says Makan.

The last part of the exhibition is more somber and muted as Alzheimers claim more and more of Vasanti. She stops eating and becomes bed-ridden; she forgets her children and her grandchildren. The work called Sleep conveys her mother in “blissful nirvana-like mood”, when pain and suffering are masked.

Vasanti died last September and her daughter’s final work, After You Have Gone, is a painting of her mother’s nightdress, hung on a white plastic hanger. A quote from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scripture, tells the story.

“Just as a man casts off his worn-out clothes and puts on new ones, so also the embodied Self casts off its worn-out bodies and enters others, which are new”.

The Exhibition opens at the KZNSA Gallery on May 11 at 6pm.