A tête-à-tête with Shilo Shiv Suleman
Bangalore-based artist, Shilo Shiv Suleman, is an INK Fellow and the Founder-Director of ‘The Fearless Collective’— a movement to reclaim public spaces through community art and participative storytelling. Her creative pursuits encompass illustrations and installation art that meditate on magic, technology, the feminine, and the divine. Pulse and Bloom, her interactive biofeedback installation visualizing brainwaves and heartbeats, received the Burning Man Honorarium Art Grant. She has been featured on global conferences like TED Talks, WIRED, and was also felicitated with the Femina ‘Woman of Worth’ Award. Her latest work titled Reincarnate ruminates the cosmic cycles of death and rebirth.
“When I decide that I am going to collaborate with someone, be it, say, a neuroscientist on a Burning Man installation and or even lend myself to a brand, I always try and find soul mates__ who I collaborate with is like finding a husband.”
Mythology, nostalgia, spiritualism, and the divine inspire your works very apparently. At what point did you feel, as an artist, that this was going to be the defining inspiration? Was this a gradual artistic process or did you have an awakening and that is when you started to paint?
I guess mythology, the divine, the sacred, spirituality, the spirit…they are completely infused in my work, yes, but they are also completely infused in my life. _ would always say that I kind _ around fiction and I know that I have seen enough magic to believe that it exists, and I feel grateful to live a life which is really infused with a lot of sacredness. I think at the core of that is a deep relationship with wonder because no matter what this moment ___we do not really know, we are in constant embrace with the eternal,the mysterious, and so for me, I think. as an artist... Scientists have to explain mystery and solve mysteries, but as an artist I get to draw, to play, to embrace the mystery without having to explain. That kind of relationship with wonder, be it wondering about how the world was made, why I exist in the world, why the world is so beautiful, how light turns to life, or how a body knows how to shape and transform when it holds life in the womb, all of those mysteries to me are the ultimate collaboration and collaborator. So, it is a very big part of my work; especially when it comes to mythology, it is quite beautiful how the collective human experience has literally existed for as long as consciousness has existed. We have been asking the same questions, things have changed but we are still embracing mystery every day. Even in mythology I live it as a capsule — as a collection of human experience and individual emotional experience.
When did this come to your consciousness? There must have been a point when you felt that you were going into this direction. Was it more like a conscious choice or would you say that it is more like a process that has developed over time?
I often say that beauty saved me because at the moment of tremendous loss and fear in my own life, it became an emotional backbone as well as a spiritual and financial one for me and my family. My Dad left when I was very young. My mother began to paint not only as a way of expressing herself and her grief at that moment, but also to take care of me and my brother. I started to paint alongside her. In the beginning, both of our paintings were full of pain, grief, and abandonment; but the beautiful thing about pain is that if you stay with it long enough it begins to shape-shift. So we did shape-shift and our worlds kind of emerged out of that. For me it was kind of an awakening, a transmutation, alchemizing where my life started to shift into a relationship with wonder and beauty.
Thank you for sharing that, you definitely make pain look very beautiful. It is also interesting to see the other projects that you are involved with. The way you look at the world, the photography, the way you present yourself. Would you like to tell me about your collaborations and putting your work in the public domain as well? You have done a lot of larger-than-life size murals. So how do you go about your collaborations, what is that instinct that makes you want to work with other people?
A lot of work has multiple converging dualities. On one hand my personal work like the show Reincarnate gets very intimate with my inner _ And then the work that I do with Fearless Collective is extremely public, it is extremely outward. There is a 50 foot tall building, with our bodies on the street, speaking to every single stranger who passes by. And what I love about being an artist is that you do not have to necessarily choose one identity over another — you can be more than one thing. For the Fearless universe, it is an embodiment of a very different part of life; we do immersive works with women across the world, particularly the women who are marginalized in some way or have been victim of gender-based violence, and we make these public monuments as a reclamation of their stories and their identities. The methodology that we use does come from a very personal space in that sense because when _ in my work a lot and every time I paint a portrait I move from who I am told to be to who I want to be; it becomes a way for me to be able to choose and alchemize. So when we paint with refugees, sex workers, transgender community, Dalit women, Muslim women, we allow for a sense of self-determination in every moment, to have the ability to renew our relationships with trauma, with ourselves, with our spaces, with the world, and with the public.
Would you say that these collaborations are intuitive and based on instincts of things that you believe in? As an artist how do you choose who you collaborate with and who to work with in future?
With Fearless, we are a full-fledged organization; we are registered as a non-profit. So we generally have a strategy in place for who are the most relevant voices that we want to be working with and amplify them, and who need to be represented and how we can bring them to the forefront. So, with Fearless it is definitely not intuitive in the sense that we __work with the women sitting in Shaheen Bagh. The protest may move but the murals that we create will remain as a testament to their resistance. We are about to start working with women in Punjab who are involved with the farmer protest there, and so this is very much a strategy. How do we amplify, how do we make the invisible visible for those who are on the margins.
With the rest of my work, the process tends to be a lot more intuitive. When I decide that I am going to collaborate with someone, be it, say, a neuroscientist on a Burning Man installation and or even lend myself to a brand, I always try and find soul mates__ who I collaborate with is like finding a husband. This is such an intimate relationship. I put so much of my energy into it that it is not easy to come by. So I am quite selective about who I collaborate with, and who is a good energy match.
I am very curious to know about your journey to Pakistan. How was the experience painting walls in cities across the border? Did you engage with the community?
It was very interestingly well-timed because five days before that, I had done my first ever show for Beloved and it felt like an arrival into the world of art and into gallery spaces and right after this show I ended up going to Pakistan. I was there with an activist, Nida Mushtaq, and as soon as I got there we began to work on the streets in that spell for the next four or five years, focusing on building Fearless into a movement. So my personal practice and art career took a backseat and Fearless took the front seat. It has been five years since and now it feels like it is time for Reincarnate — to return. So _this time marks a full circle from that trip to Pakistan building Fearless into having a space and something that allows me to focus my internal universe and my own personal art.
But Pakistan was literally one of the most interesting trips that we have done. We worked with 12 to 15 communities across the world. We painted with transgender sex workers in Indonesia, with Syrian refugees, activists in Tunisia, South Africa, indigenous communities of Brazil and Canada. But nothing has been quite as close to home as working in Pakistan. And part of it was also because the triggers were so real. The fear that my family felt around me going there was absolutely real. The fact that as an artist and an activist a lot of the people who were helping us and collaborating with us… one of them was shot, one and a half months before I was about to reach Pakistan, and there had at that point of time never been a movement of women standing on the streets painting, with their own bodies at the street. All of the images on the streets are limited to Jinnah or graffiti. So that point it was really radical and as soon as I got there we worked in four different cities. I was in Karachi, _ working with a group of young boys and girls who were _by gang violence in _._working in _in safe spaces. We were working in Rawalpindi, with the transgender community there, and with the _ community we were working in Lahore, and I finally I also gave a talk at Peshawar. Like I said, the trip was absolutely a recognition in that when we stand face to face with our fears we end up finding a space of eternal love. Behind every fear is the possibility to find love and so in Pakistan I definitely found a lot of love. Every time I felt afraid I found myself being comforted and held by that space in a way that was quite unbelievable.
Your mother is an artist as well, did that influence your work at all?
Hugely! My mother is quite literally my creator. I think even though we started painting in similar times, she started painting in her late 30s, like I said after my father left, but still she is an absolute source and inspiration and my work also is sometimes a reaction to hers. My mother is such a master in a way that very _she works for months on a painting and with a single hair brush and works on her painting for 10 tp 12 hours a day. She is really like a spiritual master when it comes to her work. As I direct rebellion to it, I will paint a huge five story wall in five days because I have to just finish it. So, we are very different from each other but I am deeply inspired by her...and she is definitely my source.
You draw a lot of inspiration from divine symbols which is very feminine and every story has Shakti in it and there is a lot of poetry in your aesthetics. So, in terms of your creative process, do you have certain rituals or practices that keep you connected to this energy? Do you read a certain kind of material?
I wish I could say that I have practices and that I meditate every day or any of that. My relationship with ritual or prayer or even ceremony definitely comes through offerings and pooja, which literally means offering to a deity. I definitely spend a lot of time praying deeply into the world and onto myself. So, with my own relationship with the kind of practice I have, I think embodiment is definitely a part of that practice. We can go to as many temples as we want but our starting point is our own body, where you do not seek out but seek in. It is not about denying the body, it is about embracing the body, loving the body, and so my body is definitely a temple and the safest place for me. And everything that I offer from this body becomes a practice. So every piece of art, every love letter, every poem, every drunken walk and conversation becomes an offering and becomes pooja for me. But aside from that I also do read a lot of poets and mythology. I read a lot of poetry, especially mystical poetry of Akka Mahadevi, Lalla, Andal, all of these women, who have come before me and who had the courage to visualize their relationship with the divine in some way. And I also spend a lot of time in places like Bali, Jaipur, and spaces that are connected to another time in a way. All of this current body of work that I have just created was all produced in Jaipur and it very much draws from the indigenous traditions and ways of being and of making them.
What are your plans for the upcoming years? As an artist do you aspire to grow in a certain direction; do you have certain projects in mind?
It is hard to make plans right now because everything is absolutely uncertain. Every plan that we try to make collectively and individually has been flooded by this. So, I think what _is to embrace that uncertainty and knowing that regardless of what is happening, it is happening as intended. Having said that, I do have set intentions for every year and with this particular year, like I mentioned earlier, I was working to let Fearless become a movement that grows beyond me, so that by the end of the year we have hundreds of South Asian women across India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh who are going out onto the street, using their bodies, reclaiming public spaces. In a way I am moving forward to becoming more of a mentor for younger female artists, so that they can really take the movement on. That is one part of it. There is also _going to Mexico City and painting a mural and another mural in Kenya. There is also a hope and possibility that the show Reincarnate will get to travel to other spaces and get to live again and again and again, like the name of the show itself. And literally dedicate all of my time to my personal practice.
