Misha Japanwala’s metal body casts are an archive of contemporary anatomy for future archaeologists. Listed nipples of anonymous residents of Karachi (the artist’s hometown), replica hands belonging to Pakistani media workers and activists, and breastplates molded from the torsos of the artist’s collaborators capture textures of unique skin, piercings and scars. Like the life casts of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Japanwala’s sculptures are portraits of a community at a singular moment. Additionally, taking a tactical stance against the male gaze at the Valie Export, Japanwala uses visibility as a form of antagonism, subverting the premium placed on marginalized bodies to perform, in states of nudity, for ends. evaluation and consumption. Breasts chain conspiratorially in her chainmail-inspired wall hanging Artifact SJ02, 2023, and in his 2023 algal series “Beghairat Congregation”, as if they were living networks of care and protection. The viewer is invited to consider nipples not as passive flesh but, like hands, as expressive metonyms of political action.
The weathered and fragmentary products of Japanwala’s casting sessions invoke the elegiac bodily traces of the “Silhouettes(Silhouettes), 1973–80. The visual idiom of ruin, excavation and fragmentation in the artist’s breastplates made over the past two years, the seven of which share the title Artifact— ironically alludes to past archaeological investigations in the Indus Valley, where broken anthropomorphic figurines found in the early 20th century have baffled and divided scholars who attempted to classify them according to rigid gender binaries. Japanwala’s fragmented corpora, however, signal beyond individual identity and anthropocentrism. On their earthy green surfaces, these sculptural garments convey some of the romanticism of the landscape. They can be removed from walls and worn, but on display, they are not sartorial or object-like, but sensually topographical, posing a timeless alliance between geology and humanity.
— Jenny Wu
