The Muse/The Subject is a double series of photographs of the model Araï Kesava Naidu, a woman from the Dalit caste who earned her living by being a model for artists. In the first series: (the Muse), Araï, naked, recreates from memory the poses she had held for many painters of Indian modernity. In the second series: (the Subject), we see her visiting the Museum of Modern Art in Bombay for the first time in her life.

The context :

I met Araï during a workshop at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay for an exhibition at Clark house entitled Liberty Taken (apart), which can be translated as dismembered Liberty but which plays on the expression " take the liberty of…” .
During this workshop, it was a question of working on the sculptures of the public space of the city of Bombay. This sculpted heritage is divided between heritage from the colonial past, and more recent monuments celebrating events or figures linked to independence and other modern politicians. Each sculpture is obviously charged with a more or less perceptible political sub-text. The physical volume of the sculpture also responds to a symbolic coordinate arranged in three dimensions: The first includes what the sculpture represents, the second the place where it is placed in the city and the third concerns the sponsors of the work.
I asked the students of the volume department who follow a very traditional course, to imagine that tomorrow there will be a revolution in India and that, as is often the case in this kind of event, we don't take to monuments because of their symbolic charge.
The students had to copy in stone the fragments they would save from destruction.
To prepare for this workshop, we organized a visit that took us from Crawford Market to India Gate to tell the story of the sculptures we found on our journey.

During this stroll in the public space, initiated by Sumesh Sharma, there was talk of Indian artistic modernity. How it had accompanied independence and how it continues today to convey positive values. This faith in Modernism, which continues to irrigate a good part of contemporary Indian artistic production, is out of step with the history of Western art and the Postmodern turn it experienced in the 70s and 80s.
When I was introduced to Araï who, at the age of seventy, continues to pose for students at the J.J. School of Art Sumesh, the idea germinated to photograph her as a memory of this Indian modernity. Indeed, Araï has a long career as a model behind her. She posed for many painters whose paintings now adorn the walls of Indian museums.
The images in this series are photographs of Araï who executes from memory the poses she had created at the request of modern painters. The posing session was done classically with a group of students drawing while I photographed it: It was important that there be a duration of the postures, a tension.

While the first series documents a body and draws parallels between its age and the historical distance from Modernity which used it as a source of inspiration, the second series documents an event: Araï visiting the collection of Modern Art from the Bombay Museum. We therefore see her strolling in front of the paintings of painters for whom she posed. It happened to be the first time in her life that she had been to the museum.
It is this precise event that the images document. Araï, anonymous witnesses of Indian pictorial modernity circulating among works that are so many milestones in a History of Art that has not retained his name.
This second series is subject to a special framework. Indeed, the master key of each frame is arranged so that Araï is always in the center of the frame, the window that contains the print therefore floats slightly to the right or to the left depending on the images.
These two series constitute a portrait of Araï, She is both this broken body with long poses in the studio which served as a model for modern Indian painters and this person suddenly discovering the place of canvases of which she had only seen the towards.