Responding critically and reflexively to the politics of contemporary urban India, Rummana Hussain's artistic practice translated her personal identity as a Muslim woman into iconicity. Born in Bangalore and educated at the Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, Kent, United Kingdom, 1972-74, Hussain lived and worked in Bombay until her death in 1999. Besides her work as an independent artist, Hussain was an active participant in SAHMAT, an association of intellectuals that promotes liberal secular politics in India through art and activism.
Read MoreUntil the destruction of Babri Masjid and the subsequent rioting in Bombay in 1992-3, Hussain's work primarily essayed social concerns through allegorical paintings. She responded to the Ayodhya tragedy with a change in medium, absorbing conceptual and installation art to renegotiate her identity in a newly contentious political climate. As she felt acutely victimized by that tragedy, Hussain's body became a governing structure in her work from this time, with the themes and lines of her work echoing her own female form. "Fragments-Multiples," her first exhibition after this transition, was held concurrently at Gallery Chemould and Jehangir Art Gallery in 1994. The domical shape of the shattered mosque surfaced as a recurring motif in her work for that show, haunting the sculptures, drawings, and assemblage works displayed.
Hussain's installation "Home/Nation" at Gallery Chemould in 1996 cast overt national politics as personal. The exhibition re-presented known pillars of Islamic architecture - mosques and minars in Ayodhya- through the artist's photographs, juxtaposing them with text, personal artifacts, and images of her own body. With personal experience inscribing religious, symbolic images and an interweaving of different mediums, the artist obscured the distinction between public memorial and private nostalgia. Living on the Margins, a performance work from this time, visualized the internal experience of lower-middle class Indian women as part of the artist's ongoing engagement with feminist social concerns.
In 1998, Hussain was the artist in residence at Art in General in New York. In Order to Join, her installation from that residency, engaged New York as a backdrop but interpolated images and artifacts from other places, including Bombay. Probing the immigrant experience and the awareness of identity in a foreign place, Hussain noted that her installation connected "the links that can be made between cultures, the rupture in memory, and the point at which we make connections with the present."
Eminent art critic Geeta Kapur has elegized that Hussain, in the final moment of her career, "issued a testimony in the name of her own mortality in the installation Space for Healing (1999), which is at the same time a tomb, a shrine, and a hospital room. It allows an apotheosis, whereby it offers to put to rest the urban nightmare - a nightmare in exact inverse of the dreamers' Bombay - that the city so determinedly keeps awake."
