Novera is a myth of broken images, of vignettes that blur the edges of fact and artifact, truth and belief, between mystery and mechanism. A watery image of a self modeled archetype of a bygone era, her hair coiled in a bun, a crest of moon to majestically sit at her crown , eyes misty and gazing at a dream, a mark of coronation blazing between brows , all colluding to perform a self that sought distinction in identity.
The product of a time when a post colonial mise-en-scene of shifting modes paved a path for negotiating varied realities, a privileged woman of substance took to moulding models and carving stones to weave narrative/autonomous expressions of a modernist vein that percolated throughout artistic practices around the world. A rebel undisguised, Novera’s craft could be a parabolic ‘doubling’ of her life, both running along un-linear courses.
Her works speak of a spirit that sought expression from within the contours of formalism, which at the same time carried within it the Eastern streak of telling stories. Her earlier works bore the marks of a descent that linked her with global traditions she had had a brush with, in this regard many an analyst of her modes refer to Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and the likes, however, there are irrefutable signs of an indefatigable spirit born of an intrinsic craving for freedom from constraints which strains at the contours of her forms inscribed as it is in a tug between subjective desire and dictates of objective form, between means and ends. The forceful determiners of convention ( both societal and artistic) and convenience (in addressing the hazards embedded in one’s spatio- temporal reality) infringed upon her latent Quixotic drives to re-negotiate ‘ gendered space’ to break down its artificial boundaries.
Though schooled in European avant-garde and its attendant qualifiers , which she closely observed and interiorized avidly, her soul could not resist the minstrel’s call. A restless bohemian, she traversed the length and breadth of rural Bangladesh seeking a spiritual communion with land’s mystique to allay her creative anxiety. Her figures are cloaked in a sanguine lustre, sedately quarrelsome, as if she quietly raises a railing finger at the prudish sway or moral censor of society at large. She did step outside the normative customs for a woman belonging to the social realities of her time.
As a second wave proponent of Bangladesh art, she received the bequeathal of the techne of synthetical confluence of modernism at large and indigenism of the locale, but with a perceptive urgency, as part of a dramatic monologue that engages the viewing mind to inspect the labyrinths of an un-quiescent soul. Her female figures appear like totems, breathing vitality in the manner of fertility goddesses, endowed with maternal bounty/plentitude. She archaeologizes the preternatural essence of a land by striking a magico-conceptual semblance in shaping her handiworks in marble, stone, cement, wood, and metal; by imbuing them with the infinite expanse of interiority, parlaying modernity with an idiom rooted in a sensibility nourished on one’s own cultural heritage with a marked affinity for the ‘beyond’.
Novera found herself in a riotous flurry of an amalgam of sometimes successive and more often than not concurrent conceptual frameworks that were slowly ossifying around the nascent but tumultuous playing field of identity polity : in an eddy of cross currents of nationalism, modernism, traditionalism, transnationalism meeting and unmeeting in a continuous struggle for the articulation of an imaginary unity of self/subjectivity (which remained essentially fractured). Modernism in the subcontinental diegesis of the desire for autonomy in its postcolonial quest for an ‘authentic voice’ was released through the reworking of the ‘given/found’ modernism – in a way more akin to trespassing its overriding precepts by way of inflecting it with a ready ware of indigenous cultural ‘apriori’. The orientalist algorithm, that had defined/delimited the reception of colonial aesthetics in post-colonial locations seems to make way for culturally alienated reading, meaning making as artists decidedly mined the contents, styles and techniques of local art forms as a way to forge a differential diorama of art peculiarly and paradoxically one’s own. Tradition was dislodged from its mooring and in telltale fragments was reoriented/assimilated/estranged into a new form of art, a nativization of modernism, whose disembodied/dislocated ‘body’ was infused with an atavistic temperament, purportedly representative of the locale; (arguably it rather led to a defusion of the originary instincts of ‘belonging’ by imbibing it into the diction/lexis of the ‘other’) thus, setting it off on a path to becoming a new language.
Transnationalism, a term that characterizes South Asian modernism of the 20th century (or modernism’s deterritorialized other) according to Iftekhar Dadi in Modernism: And the Art of Muslim South Asia, entered this territory through the local coterie of intelligentsia acting on the politically radicalized nationalist fervour, though genuine/honest in intention, to fashion a cultural protest against, a territorial division that tore the ‘multigrain’ morass of India into arbitrarily but progressively torn states of India , Pakistan and Bangladesh. This saw a migration across newly drawn borders (primarily ideological) of artists who relocated themselves according to their allegiance and affiliation to newly formed political/ethical configurations/persuasions. The microbes of local art would still take a long time to evolve into a full-bodied organism (if ever), yet, this initial thrust towards formulating a local register of art, discursive in vein as it attempts to rearticulate ‘lived practices’ of this region in relation to contemporary (and hegemonic) practice of modernism , by stalwarts in the persons of Zainul Abedin, Quamrul Hassan, Shafiuddin Ahmed, would leave a lasting imprint on the nostalgic/mnemonic imagination of the nation in the manner of a ‘big bang effect’, an ontological marker, moulding a virgin ground for others to tread. The decolonizing minds, nevertheless, inevitably as it is, remained overcast with an ‘orientalist’ fog. The simplicity, linearity of the lines and contours of their drawings testifies to European avant-garde anti-realist/illusionist, medium specific self-expressivity, albeit, sizzling with an inexorable inner force/spirit of ‘coming into one’s own’. Novera, as a successor, worked from a studied detachment to any ideological inscription, from rather a position of complicit understanding of European strands; pooling from indigenous art forms, she refashioned a post-cubist simulacra in her works which were not entirely a far cry from the likes that she studied as part of her ‘Western’ education. What sets her apart is that she sidestepped the inertia of a potentially mimetic praxis , perforce, with the alacrity of an avant-garde, bulldozing her way through socio-cultural barriers/enforcements buttressing the shrine of the obola nari ( the acquiescent damsel) and picked up her carving tools to inscribe her reflexive/ discursive visions/monographs/monograms/insignia upon stone, wood, cement, metals, heretofore untraditional mediums in a country still splashing in the backwaters of ‘civilization’. For a woman, it was a gargantuan feat or shall we say a manifesto of her fealty to art!
Modernism or modernity for that matter, an urban phenomenon, is strikingly resonant of the ideological valences of space and the gaze. City as a spatial construct, rests on the divisive laws of gendered class that maps its ‘ground’ in hierarchical grids/axes of public/private, of rich/poor, within which women’s appearance/visibility is regulated by the restrictive/proprietorial topos of masculine semiosis. In this teleology/circularity of appearance it is the despotic gaze that decides where she should be seen or not as a cardinal ‘sign’, pivotal for the preservation of the social formation. If situated in a psycho-social context of her time, Novera’s art work and their placement in the public sphere, a frieze (first of its kind) glimmering out of the walls of the then Central Public Library in 1957 and the city’s first open air fountain sculpture in the courtyard of the residence of an industrialist in Tejgaon (1958) signifies a break from the crucible of norms that enshrined women’s respectability by restricting her presence within the four walls of domesticity. She challenged the perception of ethico-religious strictures that shunned replica ion of ‘life’ in art with her open-air sculpture that represented an anthropomorphic tangle of man and animal; radicalized the bigoted cultural perception of a woman’s sublated positionality in terms of her contribution to society when she clinched the commission to erect the first urban sculpture as the first woman artist to be entrusted such a pioneering project with. She blazed a trail that was unprecedented in its significance in denoting a radical social reformation, which , unsustained, fell to ill use in later years as we witness how her name dwindles away from public memory in a calamity of amnesia that fated her art work with nightmarish negligence. In a premonitory statement in the catalogue of Novera’s first exhibition , Zainul Abedin wrote, ‘We, the citizens of Dacca, have been living with this magnificent work (referring to the frieze and the fountain)… But I think we shall take generations to assess the impact of these two works in our art life.’ As if to prove him right, Novera continues to inhabit a lacuna in the historical annals/canons of subcontinental art. Novera remained a forgotten ‘urban myth’who in her first flash of glory usurped the art arena of both East and West Pakistan riding the wings of a ground-breaking exhibition , in 1960, that heralded a new era, one that outwitted local art encounter by introducing three dimensionality of sculptures to an unsuspecting audience accustomed at the most to easel- painting. In the 90s, through the efforts of some local art critics , a somewhat sporadic interest in Novera’s legacy was revived culminating in an exhibition of some 30 sculptures in the National Museum in 1998 , excavated and restored from a state of ignominious dereliction in which these languished for years , left uncaring to the erosion of time and memory. 2015 saw another exhibition in National Museum, providing a cursory glimpse of her earlier works and much was left to be desired as the show remained nonchalantly bereft of literature of any kind throwing light on Novera’s significance as an avant-garde artist in the history of Bangladesh art.
A cultural movement was set afoot with the establishment of Government Institute of Arts in Dhaka in 1948. Institutionalization of art activity was a revolutionary first step towards defining a new system of art production and circulation as well as art’s reception/appreciation in this region. With the accelerated ardour of fishing out an idiom of local art in the offing, one can only imagine how young, impressionable minds like Novera’s must have found new inspiration to pursue a deep-seated desire to model visual stamps of her inner most thoughts. She travelled to the UK in the 1950s in defiance of parental ordain and enrolled to Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, subsequently completing the National Diploma in Design modelling and Sculpture, a move construed by many as a natural consequence of her inherited (from her mother) childhood inclination to fashioning shapes in clay. In her founding years as a sculptor Novera traversed a geographical panorama that formed a crucial axis of epistemic-aesthetic shifts : the modern flanuer in her was trotting across London, Paris , Florence , Vienna, tutoring/training under Joseph Epstein, Venturino Venturi during the later half of the 50s. It was no surprise that she was inducted into the contemporary art ‘cult/tribal convention’ that wedged itself midway between impressionist and expressionist determiners in an ongoing evolutionary art-making process , predominantly of a Western strain with far reaching influences. Now, art arises out of an evolving interplay of aesthetic, moral, cultural experience of a receptive consciousness. Artist’s subjectivity is an inalienable component in any production of art giving visual expression to the individual’s impetuses and concerns inextricably related to her spacio-temporal loci, internal as well as external. So, was also the case with Novera. Novera returned to her homeland in 1957, which initiated a shift both in her practice and perception of art. She was faced with an unforeseeable obstacle that veered her into a new trajectory, ushering in a transition from, by far purely academic practice to experimentation. Thrown aback by the difficulty of casting in metal and moulding with clay she began to scavenge indigenous materials and unrelenting, delved into experimenting with wood, plaster and cement. Her zealous appetite for yielding ‘expressive ’ shapes and forms, out of what lies dormant in these natural elements is a testament to an irrepressible ‘will’. She was prolifically whittling out a staggering number of sculptures while still mastering, and seemingly consummately at that, the techniques of manipulating the hidden properties of new materials. It was a feverish time in the then East Pakistan, as a nation was awakening to the prospects of self-determination vis a vis a war-levelled world that was increasingly recasting itself in a vivacious cultural topology emerging out of a global traffic across national boundaries; unequivocally set in a ‘quandary of modernity’ where the self and society is found locked in a dialectics of antinomy. Cuing in on the title, Inner Gaze, for Novera’s exhibition of 1960 held in the current Central Library of Dhaka University, suffice it to say that Novera was on a quest to give forms to visual equivalences of her inner states of mind. As a modern man/artist began to identify the inner recesses of his mind as a vehicle for creating true impressions of the world, he rejected the’illusional’ veracity of optical truth in favour of mental cognition and intimations; preferring knowing over seeing. Novera was also seeking self-knowledge. Progressively her works became more concentrated and provocative, often leading the viewing eyes to the facial expressions of her sculptures, particularly the female ones , etched sympathetically in an evocation of seething inner life.
Plumbing the recorded genealogical trajectory of subcontinental ‘modern’ art, it appears that Novera is nestled at a distance from the earlier generation of ‘traditionalists’, namely, Abdur Rahman Chugtai, Fyzee Rahamin, or the celebrated Bengal School of Arts who applied European techniques to the visual rendition of traditional themes. The geopolitical upheavals of late 19th and early 20th century, swept post colonial aesthetics towards a retrograde elegiac nostalgia, settling for romanticizing the robust milieu of the land. Secure in their Eurocentric mantle, these proponents dedicated themselves in churning new art out of the old mould of Persianate, Mughal ornamental hyperbolic pictorial flourishes, transfixed, likewise, in a lyrical, meditative stylistic mannerism. In the ensuing years, the ‘soporific’ was supplanted with realist representation, where broadly the ‘bucolic tableaux’ remained the staple. The constellation of Zainul, Safiuddin, Qamrul, Sultan, evolved a linear vocabulary, owing a lineage to cubist painterly decomposition; bold, steady strokes, economy of lines and concentrated imagery couched in visualization of indigenous plebian strife and triumph showed images to have been derived/wrought from the inherent logic of the composition, with minimal conceptual maneuvering. This phase inevitably rolled out to the next more experimental one, leaning artistic temperament steadily towards abstraction. This particular group of artists was led by Zubeida Agha, who embraced the European symbolist (Kandinsky, Klee) modality, in adding three- dimensionality to the pictorial plane by manipulating the plasticity and the architectonics of geometric shapes, suggestive of ideas rather than objects. Disclaiming evolutionary categorization it could be stated without any grave harm that Novera chronologically as well as stylistically belonged to this later group amidst a few like Ozzir Zuby and Nasir Shamsie with whom she shared a formalist-stylistic kinship. Caught under the modernist spell and pegging their aesthetics on invariable principles, inaugurated and developed in the ‘50s chiefly by the British artist Henry Moore, few of the sculptural pieces by Novera , Zuby and Shamsie( who held his first exhibition in Karachi in 1959) seem queerly interexchangeable as evinced by a catalogue entitled Art in Pakistan by Jalal Uddin Ahmed first published in 1954 (revised in 1962). Contemporaries like Murtaja Baseer, Aminul Islam, Syed Jahangir, Abul Baset during the turn of the decade of the 50s are also seen dabbling in the monophony of largely cubist-inspired landscape painting that found an abstract spin in Kibria’s canvases. The ethical tension between continuity and change has never been more subsumed under such religious resignation to a monolithic/unilinear cult; as at the outer edge of national consciousness pressed the phantom of ‘identity’, it seemed also to have hemmed in a fraternity of artists within the protective circle of a homogenous pale of artistic valence. In this regard it might seem that Novera smuggled a bit of the West(Pakistan) wing into the Eastern art panorama with a cross-cultural openness , nevertheless, rendering the conventional tongue susceptible to new seasoning.
Reference to Henry Moore is seen to be indispensable in any discussion on Novera’s works. Apparently it does seem that Novera’s repertoire forms a non-Western approximation of that of Moore’s, more so since they share similar influences in primitive art forms , in the traditions of Picasso, Brancusi , Giocometti, let alone in the recurrence of the theme of family throughout their careers. However, as a result of direct carving Moore’s sculptures are more volumetric, especially, the mature sculptures seem to be unmistakably endowed with sensual , interlacing curves, lending them a unique circumferential openness. Novera’s sculptures, on the other hand, display a marked predisposition towards the monolithic, cynidrical/oblong figures that ran the gamut of ancient civilizations (her forms, however, retains a peculiar morphology of their own tainted by an allusion to local traditional terracotta specimens). She was also restricted by an alternative technique of moulding cement, concrete, and plaster around iron skeletons that rendered her sculptures more jagged, angular and pronouncedly frontal. Her sculptures appear as intense embodiment of the vitality of primordial life force, in which man and nature remain indistinguishable from each other. Barbara Hepworth is also accorded mention, by virtue of the undulating holes that feature prominently in her sculptures, draping the pieces in an air of sparse, organic, weightlessness which transcribed into Novera’s works suggest a contrived possibility of movement, representing portholes looking out to new horizons viewers are invited to enter. Her low-reliefs are studies in the traditional geometric forms of subcontimental origin, three-dimensional shapes chiseled in deep, sharp lines ,arranged with a keen sense of balance in an ordered space stand out in their originality of a unique grammar.
Her forms show signs of compulsion both for vertical and horizontal mobility, fuelled by a desire for expansion, pushing the boundaries and finally to transgress/transcend. Semi-abstract female figures are seen with exaggerated, deconstructed bodies/breasts, with figures of frolicking children emerging like spectres out of their torso, turning these into a symbol for self-generating power. Corporeal and teetering at the very opposite pole of sensuality, they breathe eroticism, paradoxically as unfetishized images of fertility. Elongated figures with eyes staring into space , or gazing squarely back at the viewer, seem like voyeurs on a journey into the beyond, eyes trained on higher planes, beyond gravity, beyond the banal and the ‘stock’, towards a tryst with the ‘grand’. These very figures were transported to the planes of her paintings in later years, however, the gravitas of these final works grow increasingly solemn. Her canvases that can be traced from the early 70s down to mid-millennium, boast high toned palette of clear, bright, arbitrary colours, applied with varied , broken brushstrokes in the manner of fauvist-impressionism, representing surreal worlds or rather aviaries, where birds and humans concomitantly remain suspended in flight more like an unbound, unfulfilled wish. Her paintings can be seen as an essay in childlike creative play combined with a barbaric sense of decoration, creating an atmosphere of exhilaration, in which out of the inter-penetration between elemental colours and shapes , the picture emerges of itself, as if out of the subconscious. The psychic disquiet manifet in the predatory tone of the earlier birds finds repose in Eve in the Garden of Eden, 1992, as a recognizably earthly bird locks gazes with a nude Eve, translucent in a wash of warm orange, her body as if unnaturally lit from within. The same colour revisit Road Lalumiere (2012) to frame human figures, reduced to essential lines, as if in a void of time eternal. In 1970, Novera had her second exhibition in Bangkok, showcasing sculptures in bronze, metal sheet, welded as well as stainless steel. There were 11 assemblages, one of which was created out of broken pieces of an American aircraft gunned down in Vietnam. These were simple, unornamental, skeletal structures born of spontaneously welding together disparate materials. Experimental, bold and resplendent in a lack of finesse, these pieces avouches an adventurous spirit, an innate letch for testing one’s own mettle.
In The New Paiting:Art Notes, Guillaume Apollonaire, a poet and an essayist, who was the most influential figures in the Parisian avant-garde observed , ‘I would say that in the plastic arts the fourth dimension is generated by the three known dimensions: it represents the immensity of space eternalized in all directions at a given moment. It is the space itself, or the dimension of infinity; it is what gives objects plasticity.’ Novera’s art objects are closely allied with the spatial infinite, reorganizing a known world in a poetic rhapsody of simple forms, aided by an inner vision and its primal language of expression, and thus, exorcising the here and now with the redemptive power of the ‘beyond’, the unseen. Now, it waits to be seen what tributes are paid this visionary woman, in this clime of accelerated art endeavours!