Misha Japanwala’s metallic body casts are records of contemporary anatomies made for future archaeologists. Nipples indexed from anonymous residents of Karachi (the artist’s hometown), replicas of hands belonging to Pakistani media workers and activists, and breastplates cast from the torsos of the artist’s collaborators capture unique skin textures, piercings, and scars. Like the life casts of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Japanwala’s sculptures are portraits of a community at a singular point in time. Furthermore, taking a tactical stance against the male gaze à la Valie Export, Japanwala wields visibility as a form of antagonism, subverting the premium placed on marginalized bodies to perform, in states of nudity, for the purposes of evaluation and consumption. Breasts link up conspiratorially in her chainmail-inspired wall hanging Artifact SJ02, 2023, and in her algal 2023 “Beghairat Congregation” series, as if they were living networks of care and protection. The viewer is asked to consider nipples not as passive flesh but, like hands, as expressive metonyms of political agency.
The patinated and fragmentary products of Japanwala’s casting sessions invoke the elegiac corporeal traces of Ana Mendieta’s “Siluetas” (Silhouettes), 1973–80. The visual idiom of ruination, excavation, and fragmentation in the artist’s breastplates made over the past two years—all seven of which share the title Artifact—wryly alludes to past archaeological surveys in the Indus Valley, where broken anthropomorphic figurines found in the early twentieth century stumped and divided researchers attempting to classify them based on rigid gender binaries. Japanwala’s fragmented corpora, however, signal beyond individual identity and anthropocentricism. On their green and earth-toned surfaces, these sculptural garments carry forward some of the romanticism of landscape. They can be taken off the walls and worn, but on display, they are not sartorial or object-like, but sensuously topographical, positing a timeless alliance between geology and humanity.
— Jenny Wu
