An image of Native women of South IndiaAn image of Native women of South IndiaAn image of Native women of South IndiaAn image of Native women of South IndiaAn image of Native women of South IndiaAn image of Native women of South IndiaAn image of Native women of South IndiaAn image of Native women of South IndiaAn image of Native women of South IndiaAn image of Native women of South India

Pushpamala N.

(India 1956– )

Clare Arni

(Scotland 1962– )

Native women of South India

Location
Not on display
Further information

Three of the images in this series, including the one of the artist posed as Lakshmi, the goddess of plenty, are based on images by the famous Indian artist Raja Rami Varma (1848-1906; first prize winner at the Vienna Art exhibition 1873, and a symbol of India’s adaptation of Western painting conventions). Another image references the colonial British obsession with ethnographic documentation, specifically an infamous project of a series of photographs of aborigines of the Andaman Islands by Maurice Vidal Portman c.1893 in which natives were placed against a black and white checked background to facilitate anthropometrical measuring. The original series (in the British Library) reflects anthropological studies in the nineteenth century when there developed an obsession with the rigid examination of the physical characteristics of racial distinctions in the subcontinent.

Asian Art Department, AGNSW, April 2010.

Place of origin
India
Year
2000-2004
Media
Photograph
Medium
set of ten photographs; manual photographic print on metallic paper (edition of 20)
Dimensions
70.0 x 57.5cm each
Credit
David Jones Fund 2010
Accession number
81.2010.a-j
Copyright
©Pushpamala N.