Nilofer Suleman
b 1963
Born in 1963 at Indore, Nilofer Suleman started her journey as an artist some fifteen years ago as a cartographer and miniature artist, collecting and recreating Columbus-esque old maps, creating rivers and mountains in delicate ink-spelt detail. The imprints of this experience are clear in her paintings that bring Indian typography and street graphics and culture onto a contemporary platform. Her style juxtaposes the real world on the streets to a softer world where lotuses sprout from any surface, serpents fall asleep daintily in one’s hair, and blue-skinned lovers embrace. Besides painting, Nilofer’s creative repertoire also includes curation and writing. Her work presents a meeting point for these different worlds to interface with everyday life and popular culture. It has been exhibited in different Indian metros and at the India Art Fair. Nilofer is based in Bangalore and lives and works in the city.
Nilofer Suleman approaches her paintings in the spirit of a storyteller who enjoys nesting one episode inside another, arranging them within framed narratives and larger, circulating cycles of tales. Visually, her paintings embody the spirit of parataxis or collage through which the artists of the Mughal, Rajput, Pahari and Adilshahi ateliers bore witness to their experience of a complex and multi-dimensional world nourished by diverse sources of cultural inspiration. The movie poster, the signboard, street graffiti, studio portraiture, the devotional oleograph – all these demotic forms of expression inform her work, as do the more restrained painterly idioms of the temple, the court and the marketplace. Importantly, there is no hierarchy of sources or citations in Suleman’s art. Instead, there is a kaleidoscopic relay of imagery.
In Suleman’s realm of exquisite illusions, both windows and carpets open onto vistas, and the elements of her architecture are liable to grow wings. Suleman, who devoted herself to cartography for many years, now maps terrains that are shaped by family memory, fabular narrative, embroidered travellers’ tales and sensory excitements. Her protagonists seem to have stepped out of one genre of miniature painting or another, sometimes displaying the elongated ‘further eyes’ of Jaina manuscript illuminations or folk deities from the eastern seaboard, and at other times equipped with the almond eyes prized in Mughal painting. The bioscope, that portable precursor of cinema, is celebrated in Suleman’s art, its views into secret or distant worlds offering her a metaphor for what art can do for its celebrants.
