Sosa Joseph’s paintings don’t have centres. Each canvas unfolds without a sense of hierarchy, revealing not one but many images that just about manage to coexist within its confines. Snakeheads, catfish, and Aisha (2024), a central work in Pennungal: Lives of women and girls, Joseph’s first European solo exhibition, vibrates with the comings and goings of at least ten characters, painted to varying degrees of completion. Walking, skipping, cooking; they are too engrossed in their respective activities, some more decipherable than others, to look out at the viewer. In fact, the more vague faces don’t even have eyes to look with.
Busy, busy, busy; Joseph picks up threads and quickly drops them, leaving them in view, suspended in a state of half-thereness. It’s difficult to focus on one element of a painting for long before another begins to hum, demanding its share of attention. In Girl in the red blouse (2024), a figure studies her lone reflection in a river, her moment of quietude derailed by a faceless mob that traipses the opposite bank. Solitude is in short supply.
Interruptions like this one blight Joseph’s world. Look closely at her tableaux and you’ll notice that her characters seem to be running through treacle, their activities thwarted, often in cruel and unusual ways. In The cradle (2023-2024), a faceless couple attempts a moment of intimacy in the same room as a sleeping baby – one lover’s toes bent backwards against the other’s heel in an intense gesture between desire and frustration. In Starry, starry night (2024), a composition that echoes Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a figure stands on the side of a bridge, the infant in its arms grappling to liberate itself and leap into the water below. The approaching car seems the least of their worries.
Unlike Munch’s protagonist, the subject of some abstract existential malaise, Joseph’s characters deal (or attempt to deal) with immediate, tangible obstructions. In an interview, she described her subject as “women’s condition in general in patriarchal societies,” of which she views the Keralan village of Parumala, her childhood home and the setting of these paintings, as a microcosm. Allegorical as it may seem, her work refers to a very concrete reality.
Certain motifs mirror moments from Joseph’s life. The blue, lifeless body being carried towards a waiting boat in Night of the viper (2024), for example, recalls the artist’s aunt, who was killed by a viper on the same sugarcane field where her father worked. Looking at this painting, I wonder whether the full moon reflected in the water is the same one that presides over Starry, starry night, and whether the river is the same one that threatens to swallow its stubborn child.
This river – based on the Pamba, which runs along the edge of Parumala – is a perennial character in the exhibition. Water is less a feature and more an underpinning of the paintings. In the process of making them, Joseph regularly wipes down the surface of the canvas, washing away elements of the existing image and replacing them with new ones. “In my understanding of the world, my juvenile cosmology, if you will,” she says, “the River Pamba enveloped us; we sort of lived in a bubble inside its riverine universe.” It is in this bubble that the lives of Joseph’s women and girls take place; one where lives are continually lapped by an uncontrollable tide that always impedes and sometimes kills.
