Rummana Hussain (1952–1999) was an artist and one of the pioneers of conceptual art, installation, and politically engaged art in India.^[1]

Biography

Hussain was born in Bangalore, India to a prominent Muslim family. She was the sister of Wajahat Habibullah and wife of Ishaat Hussain. For much of her career, Hussain worked in oil and watercolor. She created largely allegorical figurative paintings.^[2][3] Her art underwent a significant transformation, however, after the events of 1992 in Ayodhya, India – a conflict between Hindu and Muslim communities which led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid.^[4] In response to the communal violence of the events, as well as to her sudden exposure to ideological assault as a Muslim, Hussain's art not only became more explicitly political as well as personal, but it moved away from traditional media towards installation, video, photography, and mixed-media work.^[5] Throughout the 1990s, Hussain participated in exhibitions and events organized by SAHMAT, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, alongside other politically conscious artists and performers.^[6] She was invited to be an artist-in-residence at Art in General in New York City, in 1998, just a year before she died, at age 47, after a battle with cancer.^[7] Hussain's work has been on view in exhibitions and art fairs worldwide, including at Tate Modern, in London, National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), in Mumbai, Smart Museum, in Chicago, the 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial, in Brisbane, Australia, and at Talwar Gallery, which represents the estate of the artist.^[8] Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Queensland Art Gallery , in Queensland, Australia.

Work

Hussain is cited as one of the foremost leaders in the development of conceptual art in India, and is credited with bringing the possibilities and merits of diverse media to critical and popular attention.^[9] According to curator and scholar Swapnaa Tamhane, Hussain made a distinctive shift from allegorical and figurative paintings to multi-media works in an urgent response to the politics of the day. Being a secular Muslim from a cosmopolitan family with deep political influence, Hussain suddenly found herself being isolated by a discriminating society.^[10] Despite her association with conceptual art, however, Hussain's work remains grounded in the physical using, rather than ignoring, the "sensuousness" of the various materials that make up her installations.^[11] Critics often reference this emphasis on materiality in the discussion of the social, specifically feminist, concerns of much of Hussain's oeuvre which acknowledges female corporeality as its starting point.^[12] Several of her video and performance-based pieces, for example, center on Hussain's own body – a tactic that positions her work at a unique juncture between the political and personal, the public and private. According to art historian Geeta Kapur, Hussain "makes [female and religious identity] matter in a conscious and dialectical way…she not only pitches her identity for display, she [also] constructs a public space for debate."^[13] Hussain's work both establishes an effective relationship with the viewer, and challenges him or her to act.

While Hussain was from a wealthy, educated family, she wanted to represent the voice of lower class Muslims, and did so as she began to work in performance around 1993-1994. She began to question her use of materials like paint and canvas, and wanted intentionally to adopt “domestic” materials found in the home used by women (used by the unaccounted for, unrepresented labour force of domestic servants). Hence, she began to use washing detergents, chopping knives, cloth, or food. Her performances, Living on the Margins (1995), Textured Terrain (1997), Is it what you think? (1998), and In Between (1998), all contain materials that continue from one performance into the other. She wore dancer’s anklets with bells (gungurus), a hair extension (pharandi), and physically embodied a certain sense of movement and the fleeting quality of sound. In particular, she dons a burka, something that she never – nor members of her family – wore in their daily life as modern, educated, cosmopolitan Muslims – and plays with its symbolism, presence, signification, shape, and interrogates its meaning.^[14]

Rummana Hussain's repetition or imagery and recycling of materials presented in non-hierarchical modes of display became part of a language she used to articulate the process of understanding her own identity and position. Her last work, A Space for Healing (1999), was made as a resting place for herself and her nation, for the confusion between retaining tradition and yet embracing a future that negotiates a raging capitalism. She created the symbiotic feeling of both a mosque and a hospital with stretchers laid out resembling prayer mats, and blackened, rusted tools running around the perimeter, that appear to be an Urdu script but in fact communicate nothing. This was a metaphorical 'space for healing', as Hussain died just after finishing the work, and the work was made in thinking conceptually of joining the physical and the spiritual.^[15]

Notable exhibitions

Personal life

Rummana was married to Ishaat Hussain, an Indian businessman and former interim chairman of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). They have a daughter, Shazmeen, who married Indian filmmaker Shaad Ali in 2006. The couple divorced in 2011. She's currently married to and has a child with Rustom Lawyer.^[2][24]

While her ancestors were wealthy landowners in areas east of Lucknow, her parents were politically involved (her father, General Enaith Habibullah, established the National Defence Academy in Pune, and her mother, Hamida Habibullah, was Minister of Uttar Pradesh, a member of parliament and the All India Congress, to name only two amongst many positions she held during the 1970s). Hussain’s grandmother, Begum Inam Habibullah, founded the Talimgah-E-Niswan College that focused on the education of Muslim girls, and the first English Degree College, Avadh Girls Degree College. Both were then presided over by her mother (b. 1916) who was also the President of SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association), an organization for the improvement of women’s rights in the embroidery industry in Lucknow. Coming from this background with an embedded sense of feminist action, from a city like Lucknow with its rich history of architecture, research in science and mathematics, a love and belief in arts and culture, and the first city to show a resistance to colonialism, one can read these pervasive influences into Hussain’s work.^[25]

Death

Rummana died of Cancer on 5 July 1999. She was 47.^[2][26]

References

External links

• Art India, "Look Back in Anger," August 2019
• Artforum, January 2016.
• Flash Art, "In Order to Join CSMVS and Goethe-Institute / Mumbai", April 2015
• Rummana Hussain in the permanent collection of the Queensland Art Gallery.
• Art India, The Courage of Being Rummana, January–April 1999.
• The New York Times, Rummana Hussain, 47, Indian Conceptual Artist, 18 July 1999.
• The New York Times, Rummana Hussain, 23 October 1998.
• The New York Times, Rummana Hussain: In Order to Join, 16 October 1998.