As a fundamentally objectifying discourse, exoticism is fueled by a
hunger for collecting. The desire for exotica reduced non-Western parts
of the world to mere marketplaces in the colonial imagination. In such a
flattened conception of much of the world, the line between object and
person appears especially blurry. In Bhasha Chakrabarti’s bold Frick Rug
series, the artist finds a source of power and agency by repurposing
practices of objectification, transforming exotic objects in western
collections into platforms of subversive embodiment.

Bhasha
Chakrabarti’s powerful Frick Rug series taps into two major themes in
her multifaceted practice: The material history of colonialism and the
cultural significance of textiles. Bhasha’s work takes on two notable
carpets in The Frick Collection in New York, which were elevated from
decorative elements on the floor to elevated artworks on the wall
through a curatorial shift in the early 2000s. Bhasha paints facsimiles
of the rugs, which were commissioned during the reign of the Mughal
emperor Shah Jahan.

Upon the rugs, she paints herself nude as
Mumtaz Mahal, Shah Jahan’s beloved wife who was famously entombed in
the Taj Mahal. Chakrabarti depicts herself in the two forms for which
Mumtaz was best known. One, gesturing to portraits where she’s depicted
smelling a flower, and second, deceased, laid to rest in the world’s
grandest mausoleum. Bhasha also recreates the fragments that were
trimmed and distributed globally after the rugs were resized for wall
display, hung on the wall as reminders of the arbitrary lines through
which exotic objects are classified as decorative or significant.

Building
on a larger practice of painting herself nude on rugs in colonial
collections, Chakrabarti transforms her seemingly objectified body as a
site of resistance, which, like the recreated rug, forces a
reconsideration of power relations. Chakrabarti’s bold, unapologetic use
of her own nude form challenges the viewer to think about their own
relationship to the process of objectification, a dynamic that shapes
our relationships to goods and bodies alike. Chakrabarti’s painterly
technique in composing both the carpet and her figures centralizes the
pleasure of beauty, but also raises questions of how the decorative and
erotic are inextricably linked with structures of power.