From Mumbai to Perth and beyond, Neha Kale considers, art, colonialism and ideas of home

Neha Kale’s A Foreign Return: On Art and Inhabitation seamlessly entwines memoir with art criticism. It’s a long consideration of art, colonisation, nostalgia and the places we may call home. Review: A Foreign Return: On Art and Inhabitation – Neha Kale (New South) Kale, who was born in Mumbai and now lives in Sydney, begins this unusual book with a description of Indian artist Dayanita Singh’s photographic installation, Suitcase Museum. The small black and white images of domestic interiors evoke childhood memories of holidays at Kale’s grandfather’s house in Goa. The clutter of first memories from the Suitcase Museum is a visual contrast to the careful control in Kale’s analysis of another painting dealing with ideas of home, Australian artist John Brack’s 1953 work, The New House. One of the pleasures of this book is the way the author translates her memories of time and place into analyses of individual works of art that have shaped her understanding of life. In Brack’s case, it is his evocation of 1950s suburbia. Brack’s painting is of a modern suburban interior. A man stands tall in front of a mantlepiece, complete with a clock and reproduction of Van Gogh’s The Langlois bridge, while his adoring wife stares up at him, the provider of their prosperity. Unlike those who have seen Brack’s work as satirical, Kale recognises his appreciation of his subjects’ achievement in buying their own piece of post-war aspiration. Brack’s generation was shaped by the Great Depression, while its youth was spent at war. The 1950s was a decade of affluence after deprivation. Kale’s family is a part of the great Indian diaspora. When she was a child, they left their apartment in Mumbai for a bungalow in Perth. She remembers being entranced by the intense blue of the southern sky and the way each suburban house was self-contained, with no need to relate to its neighbours. The neat, sliced-white-bread Perth suburb where Kale’s family settled was a contrast to the untidy multicultural narratives of television shows like Heartbreak High. But even the whitest of Perth’s suburbs were divided by class. Kale describes the less-than-subtle signs of class discrimination: “Our (debating) opponents studied at places with one word names” (Hale, Wesley). When three young women were killed in the Claremont murders of the mid-1990s they became the centre of media attention, in part because they were from Perth’s privileged “golden triangle” suburbs. The killing of women from lesser places did not gain the same response. Encounters Violence against women is hardly a new story, but few artists have been able to express their response to masculine violence as effectively as the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes, circa 1620. Wikimedia Commons Kale writes at length about Gentileschi and her best-known subject, Judith Beheading Holofernes. Gentileschi was a victim both of rape and the inquisitorial aftermath. Her rapist, an artist who was married, served a short prison sentence. Hale’s narrative then pivots from Gentilischi, an outlier in 17th century Italy, to modern feminist installations, including those of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’ Approximacion al lugar de los hechos and Canadian Rebecca Belmore’s performance of Vigil. Both artists tap a rich vein of feminist rage. The chronology of Foreign Return is loosely structured around the author’s life, which means her analysis comes in the order of her encounters with individual works of art. She grasps the visual language of these works and lets them speak to her, using art to interpret her life. The Cuban/American artist Ana Mendieta died in 1985, well before Kale was born. Her Silueta series, where Mendieta recorded photographs of her own body being embedded and imprinted in mud, tells of both universal and individual connections with the earth. Kale encountered this work at a time when she was finding her own sense of self. Years later, when she is living a more contented life in Sydney’s Enmore, Kale describes the Australian printmaker Cressida Campbell’s woodcuts as works that talk of intimacies and flowers, joyous life on a small scale. Camouflage New South In her 20s, after graduating from university, Kale decamped from Perth to London. The London chapter begins with a magnificent description of Tracy Emin’s iconoclastic My Bed. As with many from former British colonies, Kale came to England with a belief in the neat social structure of Enid Blyton’s fiction. Instead she found herself in a complicated world where rules were shaped by class, race and culture. As an Indian living in England, she was less of a cultural minority than when she lived in Australia. Nevertheless, she found it easier to move away from the security of living with relatives, gravitating to other young Australians and New Zealanders. In London, she changed her speech from the clipped tones of Indian English to an Australian drawl. She learned to camouflage as she moved between the different cultures cohabiting the sprawling city. She describes the way she adapted to this new context by likening herself to the foxes of London who make their dens under sheds and next to embankments. Changes and consequences Australian photographer Carol Jerrems’ 1977 photograph, Mirror with a Memory: Motel Room, is a record of the end of a relationship. The ruthless honesty of Jerrems’ self-scrutiny is echoed for Kale when she moves to Melbourne and finds the courage to live alone. Jerrems’ arresting photograph Vale Street, depicting her model topless and flanked by two young men, is sometimes seen as the quintessential image of 1970s’ counter-culture, but I’ve always thought of it as a demonstration of the connection between subject and photographer. It is the final photograph after a long session of posing – Jerrems had only just suggested the model remove her top. Kale writes of how Jerrems’ “sitters were lit so tenderly, her attention tracing their features”. There is a sense of yearning when she writes of Jerrems. This could be, in part, because Jerrems died young, many years before Kale was born. But it is also the way Jerrems seems to enter her subjects’ world, revealing it to us. While Kale finds the Yarra River so turgid “you couldn’t see your reflection, no matter how hard you tried”, she finds Sydney a city with an expanding horizon. Descriptions of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House lead to Brett Whiteley. The Windsor & Newton oil paint Whiteley uses is straight from the tube, the intensity of his favoured ultramarine pigment adds to its impact. For all that she appreciates his sweeping, sensuous lines, Kale understands that Whiteley’s defining characteristic was his ambition. When she visits his posthumously gentrified studio she sees his 1973 magnum opus, Alchemy, but also starts to see the limits of ambition. With Whiteley, dare I say it, his ego was greater than his skill. When Kale looks at Whiteley’s lovingly sensuous Woman in Bath, she doubts he would find a brown girl as beautiful as the pink and white one he painted with such pleasure. Brett Whiteley’s ‘posthumously gentrified’ studio. Bianca de Marchi/AAP Is it Whiteley’s art that causes her to begin to doubt herself? Perhaps it is the futility of striving to reach a horizon that can never be reached. The gentrified wharves of Woolloomooloo remind her of the mass migration of the post-war years. She sees that despite feeling marginalised by her race and immigrant status, as an educated person from a relatively affluent family, she has privileges others never will. Ways of seeing A return visit to India gives Kale more questions than answers. The rise of Hindu nationalism changed more than governments. It has changed language – including the names of places. Her childhood home of Bombay is now Mumbai and Hill Road is Ramdas Nayak Road. Among people who are not politicians, the old names are still spoken and there is still high tea at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Memory, especially childhood memory, distorts. The giant rivers of childhood are found to be small streams. She asks: how many of our memories are distorted by time? The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY The photographs of Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first professional woman photographer, record the transformation of colonial vassal to independent state. While Vyarawalla is better known for her staged images of the celebrations of the end of British rule, it is her earlier photographs “of young girls learning to inhabit their bodies” that, in Kale’s eyes, are her most distinctive work. The book falters, and Kale’s writing seems almost as uncertain, when she describes her state of mind and the loss of balance that comes with a major illness, eventually diagnosed as acoustic neuroma, a benign tumour next to the auditory nerve that started with a constant ringing in her ears. Nostalgia is usually seen as a sentimental longing for the past, but with her illness Kale seems to experience nostalgia in its original sense, as a pathological homesickness, which is less than pleasant. She is at the University of Sydney when she sees English artist Bridget Riley’s 1966 painting, Static 2. Riley’s work is based on optical illusion and perception, but such is Kale’s state of mind that she cannot tell if it is the painting or herself that is shaking. What is real, and what ultimately sustains Kale, are relationships between people, a sense of place – and art. Cooking for friends with the easing of the Covid lockdown is the trigger for both a discussion of Indian food and Hungarian-Indian modernist Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting Haldi Grinders, a painting that honours the work of women preparing food. There is value in domesticity, and connections with family. By the end of the book, Kale comes to understand that home is less a physical location, but wherever family and friends gather together. The intermingling of autobiography and art leads Kale to consider her current home in Sydney’s inner west next to the Cooks River, a place famous for its pollution, mangroves and mud. The sight of fresh mangrove shoots after rain gives her a realisation of the many layers of history this waterway has seen and will continue to see. This leads to a consideration of recent art by Danie Mellor, a contemporary Australian artist whose ancestry is a mix of Ngadjon-jii, Mamu, Scottish and Irish. Kale notices how Mellor’s works combine different ways of seeing, so they appear to simultaneously reference different times and cultures – a visualisation of the Aboriginal concept of “everywhen”, where past, present and future come together. Ways of seeing will always be modified by the viewer’s state of mind.