For Kerala

In Kerala, the Onam festival is in full swing. Across the Indian multicultural art hub, family members, friends, and neighbors prepare to celebrate the Hindu harvest festival over Sadya, the big feast at the heart of it all. Beyond the southwestern coastal state, the celebration extends across the globe, to community halls, private homes, and, now, Rajiv Menon Contemporary. For the gallery’s eponymous founder and the artists in his community like Melissa Joseph, the memories of Onam are reminders of the cultural significance of their own heritage. A love for their homeland unites the two in their dual efforts to preserve their own histories and uncover new ways to connect to the culture in an ever-changing world.

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Joseph, whose work has been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, ICA Miami, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the past year, creates intricate scenes that activate both collective and personal memories of loss and tenderness. The Indian-American artist’s work is included in the upcoming Brooklyn Museum 200th anniversary show as well as a two-person booth with Kim Dacres at Art Basel Miami Beach. Menon, who was born in Texas and got his start as a documentary filmmaker, founded his eponymous gallery last September. His dynamic exhibitions platform artists from South Asia and its diaspora, with his latest, “Three Steps of Land,” which opens September 14, honing in on Onam as a lens to see Kerala.

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In the days leading up to the opening, the friends and collaborators reunite to discuss Joseph’s new felt and recycled sari-silk depiction of a personal Sadya scene, the first work of hers that Menon collected, their childhood memories of Kerala, the importance of Onam, and how art and heritage are deeply intertwined.

Rajiv Menon: Before I met you, I met your art, and that's such a big part of our relationship and the genesis of this exhibition. It was in 2021… I remember I saw this small, felt piece I ended up collecting that depicts your father approaching the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, a place that my family loves really dearly. Encountering that work was a moment I'll always remember. It completely shifted the way I viewed art. It sparked this obsession with thinking about how art can fill in gaps of our experience of memory… and I see so much of that in how I've curated this show. But when did we meet for the first time in person?

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Melissa Joseph: It was shortly after that 2021 show because that was the beginning of me entering into the commercial art space.

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RM: It feels like you've always been a part of my life now. I remember this amazing moment when we had dinner, and you brought up Racial Melancholia [David L. Eng and Shinhee Han’s 2019 book], and I was like, ‘Wait, I am reading that!’ It was such a niche, nerdy Asian American theory thing that we both immediately clicked. 

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MJ: That was my first experience really selling a work, and the idea that it could go to someone who had similar memories to the ones that I had was a new phenomenon for me. I'll always remember that. Then at that dinner, I remember thinking, These are people who are young and inspired and doing really important work around South Asian identity in the U.S…I hadn't heard of anybody else who was doing that. I felt like, Whoa, there's a movement happening. It felt like a spark. I left there energized and excited about the possibility for things that have come to fruition since, like your gallery, like some of these group get togethers that we have now at art fairs or at events, and these exhibitions that you're doing. What I love is how it has expanded: You're bringing in young artists from the U.K. and artists from India, so I always meet new artists at your shows, too. 

RM: Yeah, the community has been such an exciting part of it. And it's moments like this and getting to work with artists like you where it's not just about the showing of the work, not just the transaction of it, but it's so much more in terms of what we're building together. The genesis of this show was really in conversation with you. I would love to hear more about this specific work you made for the show.

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MJ: This new piece [Onam Sadya at Night, 2024] comes from a photo of my cousin's apartment with almost an empty table… I think my uncle and my aunt are in the back, but there were probably 12 people there in total. It shows the passing of time. It's a little bit sad to me because of the emptiness of it, but it's also very beautiful that it's able to be preserved even in spite of all of these other things. I wanted to think about how these transitions are happening, and I also recently lost my own mom. I'm thinking a lot about aging and what happens to traditions when the people who embody the traditions are gone. 

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I made another Onam work before that was very crowded with figures; it was from a meal with my aunt and uncle and cousins a few years ago, and it was the last year that my aunt Tessy had been alive. She didn't have any kids, but she was the one who cooked. She was the keeper of all the recipes. It was important to me to mark that my aunt was gone, so in that image, she is just an outline, and everyone else is rendered fully. The days of the 100 people at my grandmother's house are gone; it's a different time. Many of those people are gone, but so is the lifestyle where everybody lived in the same place. The world is changing, like everywhere else. 

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RM: Yeah, completely. That progress of the relationship is really moving and something that I feel so deeply as well. I always say that the gallery was founded to bring South Asian art and South Asian culture to the broader LA art landscape, but also to bring South Asian people to contemporary art in LA, and the Onam dinner is really going to exemplify that. We're bringing in some great people from the art world, and then some really prominent figures from the South Asian community as well. It's meant to be kind of that type of cultural intersection and really bridge two parts of my life. Also, it will be catered by Mayura, which focuses on cuisine from Kerala. We're encouraging people to wear festive Kerala dress or South Indian festive clothing. One thing I haven’t asked you: What was the first time you visited Kerala? 

MJ: I had my first birthday there. My parents would take us every couple of years as children. We were there for Onam multiple times when I was young, and I have very, very vivid memories of sitting on the floor and eating and it being massive, just with the sheer number of people that were invited. And it's interesting looking back as I've grown up… The piece I made for your show and the other Onam piece I made a few years ago both show my aunt and uncle aging. The celebration changed once my grandparents were gone and my dad’s family began aging; once everybody didn't necessarily gather in one house and began doing their own smaller versions. So that I think about, too. I've gone to some celebrations here in the U.S. at the houses of friends of mine who live here, and the energy of each event can differ so drastically. I'm excited to do it at your gallery and to see how different this holiday can look. 

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RM: Yeah, I haven't hosted my own before. I've always participated in others. As a kid, I spent so much time in India and Kerala growing up, but I was almost always in the US for Onam because it is during the school year. So my memories of Onam are at these big community halls in Houston. It was always associated with a longing for Kerala, all these people trying to recreate what they miss. It's such a classic diaspora feeling, and I think that's a big engine behind the curation of the show: How, like gathering around food, contemporary art can recreate a sense of a place here. And, I mean, people from Kerala are obsessed with Kerala. It’s such a special place. And my experience is really similar to yours since my grandmother passed away. I really just have a handful of relatives left in Kerala, and my relationship with the place is changing rapidly. So I'm very conscious of how I can continue to build and maintain a place that is very much a part of me.

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MJ:  I would love to hear about some of the artists you are including and what their stories are. 

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RM: Well starting with Devi Seetharam, she paints mostly men in traditional Kerala garments, which are called mundus. To be able to do her U.S. debut—and to see the reactions we're getting to her work—feels so well deserved. I [also] brought in a couple artists from wider South India and Sri Lanka because I wanted to think about regionalism broadly. Nibha Akireddy and Sivasubramaniam Kajendrann are doing really interesting figurative work, thinking about mythology and regionalism and regional identity, and they'll be in conversation with Surendran Nair, who is truly one of my favorite artists of all-time. He is one of India's most celebrated living artists, and he brings imagery from Kerala and very regionally specific styles of painting into conversation with mythological traditions from Greece and Japan. 

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The rest of the show is focuses sharply on artists with roots in Kerala. Lakshmi Madhavan’s method is in collaboration with some of the last weaving communities in Balaramapuram, Kerala. Then Nityan Unnikrishnan is a very established mid-career artist in India who hasn't shown in the US before, and he's coming out of the leftist tradition in Kerala. Kerala was, I believe, the first democratically elected communist government in the world, so leftism isn’t just a political system, it's a culture there. So all of these 11 artists are coming into this great tapestry of bringing Kerala to life.

MJ: I don't think there's ever been a show like this before. 

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RM: I know. I wanted to make the gallery that I wish had existed when I first started collecting and first started getting interested in art. It's important for me to show the world that Kerala is a really significant art location and cultural location that we should be paying attention to. It has the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. It is such an amalgamation of culture. It was a major port for India. It was the gateway to the world. It's always been such a cosmopolitan place that's been defined by cultural exchange and history. 

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MJ: It's really interesting, the plural histories that exist in Kerala. My family is Christian. Onam is the only Hindu holiday that the family actually celebrates, so that's another part of Kerala that's very unique: It has this very active Christian and Jewish population.

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RM: The Onam story really shows how Kerala is such an outlier in the rest of India, and why it's so important to think about. The myth goes that there was this king named King Mahabali who ruled what is now associated with contemporary Kerala. He was so powerful that he was seen as a threat to the gods and so Lord Vishnu, in an effort to subdue him, came down in the form of a dwarf and said, I need three steps of land to do a religious ceremony. Would you as the king provide this for me? Then Vishnu took a much larger form, and took a step over the heavens, a second step over the Earth, and with the third step, he placed his foot on Mahabali’s head and pushed him down into the underworld. And he is now said to only return once a year during the harvest. In most of India—and in most of the Hindu tradition—the story is about Vishnu and about the subjugation of an arrogant. In Kerala, we're all into Mahabali, and we celebrate him, and through that we have put a stake at how our culture is unique and how we want to highlight and celebrate it. To be able to bring that to LA is really special. So much of how South Asian culture or Indian culture is portrayed in the U.S. is very generalized and North Indian-centric. I think in the effort to include everyone, a lot of the regional specificity gets lost.

MJ: And I love that you're bringing in food as well because that's another area where we are slowly starting to get more variation in the U.S. [For a long time] there were British pubs that had curries and restaurants that would likely be general North Indian cuisine, but now we have places like Semma in New York that are Michelin starred, South Indian-specific food. So it's growing. There's been enough time or at least enough consistent exposure to South Asian culture that some of these nuances are coming up. There's Sri Lankan restaurants in Staten Island that people will travel to. People are ready—in a much different way than I can remember in my childhood—for the idea of a nuanced South Asian population versus just a monolith. I think that's something that's happening in tandem with how art allows nuance in. 

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RM: I've been thinking about the relationship between food and art, and your piece encapsulates that because so much of the diaspora experience solves those losses of culture through food. Food becomes a way to feel that a little bit of home, and I wanted to think about how art can do something really similar. When I see your work that depicts Kerala, I get that connection. I'm able to recover emotions, and that is so incredibly powerful. 

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MJ: We talk about representation all the time, and it's an ongoing issue—but I don't think it's a coincidence that people are coming to your gallery, probably seeing themselves in work for the first time, and then purchasing work for the first time. It's been powerful to see.

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RM: I'm doing this for Kerala. I want to bring the place here. There's been so much growth in the visibility of South Asian people in media and film and television, and it is essential to bring the visual arts into that conversation. With every show, I keep saying “Something special is happening in LA.” And I really feel like this one is going to push that even further.

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“Three Steps of Land" is on view September 14 through October 2, 2024 at Rajiv Menon Contemporary at 3110 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026.