Desire, as in that very strong feeling of really wanting something, is not an unknown experience for most of us. Yet when we desire, we often don’t want to look at it. What we desire, we also want to avoid at the same time– a contradiction we carry within ourselves. When it comes to sexual desire, we want to be confronted by it even less, let alone express it in any way. Especially in the South Asian context, silence and shame surround the ability to easily express when it comes to desire. So to unwrap the complex experience in a simpler way, requires the touch of an artist. The language of colours and lines is a more accommodating medium for desire than everyday words. 

Take a look at these two paintings written by Mandira Naidoo and Nirmala Biluka– Male Ideal (I)/Kama Peacock Male I and Caged Desires. Housed in the Sexuality and Desire section of the exhibition, Visible/Invisible: Representation of Women in Art through the MAP Collection, these artworks are tied together by a more overt thread than the theme of desire and sexuality: birds.

Male Ideal (I)/Kama Peacock Male I is a collage where upon the white background, a solid man-bird figure made out of X-ray sheet and paper stands. The figure’s posture is unusual, standing as it is on one leg, balancing itself. But what also stands out is the many-hued bird of blue and its positioning on the dark body. 

Peacocks dance and fan out their multicoloured tails not just to attract mates, but also to express joy and vivacity at the arrival of rain. Their display is not just a prelude to sexual mating but an expression of their feelings at a welcome change in the outside world. An inner landscape that is otherwise hidden from our eyes, and thus beyond our usual consideration, the feelings of peacocks are made manifest when they fan out their plumage. Mandira Naidoo’s artwork is a moment of pause because here we can see the female gaze turned on the male figure and its sexuality and expression of desire. Male Ideal (I)/Kama Peacock Male I is created in a way that is reminiscent of silhouettes and shadows, regions of umbra and penumbra– a pointer toward both clarity of the lines that define form and an absence of particularity. Part of the Kama (Desire) series of paintings, where the male body is juxtaposed with the peacock’s, a way to approach this work could be to read male sexual expression as seen by the female gaze: a space that could do with the honesty and beauty of a peacock’s expression of desire. It could also be said that the male ideal is of a way of being where desire can be expressed and seen in the same way as the mating rituals of a peacock. 

Caged Desires is a watercolour painting. A woman sits with her back toward our gaze. Her face is partly turned toward us. Though her eyes are closed, her face as well as her posture communicate a calm. Hues of orange, blue, green, brown and maroon diluted to their lighter shades, soften the view as well. In some places, pools of colours appear– near the curve of the wings of the egret/crane, the curve of the woman’s shoulder, her hair, their beaks. As if these dark spots are where the form is coagulating and becoming denser. Is the body the seat of desire, is it the cage? Are the birds only free in the inner landscape? Why are the woman’s eyes closed and her body turned away from the world? 

Nirmala Biluka’s painting can be seen as an invitation to dip into the soft nature of desire and the harshness that is imposed by the world of physical form. 

Look again at the peacock stretching out from where a man’s phallic organ would be. See the woman merged with the landscape, birds that resemble storks or egrets walking the landscape of her being, spreading their wings into the outer world. The contrast of these two artworks can be seen through the ideas they convey, as well as the artworks’ materiality and solidity.

Both artworks are a part of the Sexuality and Desire section of the the permanent exhibition, Visible/Invisible: Representations of Women in Art through the MAP Collection on view at MAP.