Rummana Hussain

Hussain was born in Bangalore, India to a prominent Muslim family. She was the sister of Wajahat Habibullah and wife of Ishaat Hussain. For much of her career, Hussain worked in oil and watercolor. She created largely allegorical figurative paintings.{{cite news|first=Holland|last= Cotter|title=Rummana Hussain, 47, Indian Conceptual Artist|newspaper=The New York Times |date=18 July 1999}}{{cite news|first=Anupa |last=Mehta|title=An Inward Journey|newspaper=The Independent |date=30 March 1994}} Her art underwent a significant transformation, however, after the events of 1992 in Ayodhya, India – a conflict between Hindu and Muslim communities which led to the destruction of the Babri Masjid.{{cite journal|title=Ten memorable exhibitions from last year|journal=ArtAsiaPacific|date=January 2013}} In response to the communal violence of the events, as well as to her sudden exposure to ideological assault as a Muslim, Hussain's art not only became more explicitly political as well as personal, but it moved away from traditional media towards installation, video, photography, and mixed-media work.{{cite news|first=Ranjit |last=Hoskote|title=The Metaphor Survives|newspaper=The Times of India|date= 17 April 1994}} Throughout the 1990s, Hussain participated in exhibitions and events organized by SAHMAT, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, alongside other politically conscious artists and performers.{{cite journal|first=Kamala |last=Kapoor|title= Home Nation|journal=Art Asia Pacific|year= 1997}} She was invited to be an artist-in-residence at Art in General in New York City, in 1998, just a year before she died, at age 47, after a battle with cancer.{{cite news|first=Holland |last=Cotter|title=Rummana Hussain: In Order to Join|newspaper=The New York Times|date= 16 October 1998}} Hussain's work has been on view in exhibitions and art fairs worldwide, including at Tate Modern, in London, National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), in Mumbai, Smart Museum, in Chicago, the 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial, in Brisbane, Australia, and at Talwar Gallery, which represents the estate of the artist.{{cite web|title=Rummana Hussain|url=https://www.talwargallery.com/artists/rummana-hussain#tab:slideshow|accessdate=31 July 2014|publisher=Talwar Gallery}} Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, in Queensland, Australia.

According to curator and scholar Swapnaa Tamhane, Hussain made a distinctive shift from allegorical and figurative paintings to multi-media works in an urgent response to the politics of the day. Being a secular Muslim from a cosmopolitan family with deep political influence, Hussain suddenly found herself being isolated by a discriminating society.{{cite journal|first=Swapnaa |last=Tamhane|title=The Performative Space: Tracing the Roots of Performance-based Work in India|journal=C Magazine |issue=110|date=2011}} Despite her association with conceptual art, however, Hussain's work remains grounded in the physical using, rather than ignoring, the "sensuousness" of the various materials that make up her installations.{{cite book|first=Roshan |last=Shahani|title=Ways of Seeing in '94|year= 1994}} Critics often reference this emphasis on materiality in the discussion of the social, specifically feminist, concerns of much of Hussain's oeuvre which acknowledges female corporeality as its starting point.{{cite news|first=Vishwapriya L|last= Iyengar|title=Looking for meaning in myriad|newspaper=The Asian Age|date=December 2009}} Several of her video and performance-based pieces, for example, center on Hussain's own body – a tactic that positions her work at a unique juncture between the political and personal, the public and private. According to art historian Geeta Kapur, Hussain "makes [female and religious identity] matter in a conscious and dialectical way…she not only pitches her identity for display, she [also] constructs a public space for debate."{{cite journal|first=Geeta |last=Kapur|title=The Courage of being Rummana|journal=Art India|date=January–April 1999}} Hussain's work both establishes an effective relationship with the viewer, and challenges him or her to act.

While Hussain was from a wealthy, educated family, she wanted to represent the voice of lower class Muslims, and did so as she began to work in performance around 1993-1994. She began to question her use of materials like paint and canvas, and wanted intentionally to adopt “domestic” materials found in the home used by women (used by the unaccounted for, unrepresented labour force of domestic servants). Hence, she began to use washing detergents, chopping knives, cloth, or food. Her performances, Living on the Margins (1995), Textured Terrain (1997), Is it what you think? (1998), and In Between (1998), all contain materials that continue from one performance into the other. She wore dancer’s anklets with bells (gungurus), a hair extension (pharandi), and physically embodied a certain sense of movement and the fleeting quality of sound. In particular, she dons a burka, something that she never – nor members of her family – wore in their daily life as modern, educated, cosmopolitan Muslims – and plays with its symbolism, presence, signification, shape, and interrogates its meaning.{{cite journal|first=Swapnaa |last=Tamhane|title=Rummana Hussain: Building Necessary Histories|journal=N.paradoxa Vol.34|date=July 2014}}

Rummana Hussain's repetition or imagery and recycling of materials presented in non-hierarchical modes of display became part of a language she used to articulate the process of understanding her own identity and position. Her last work, A Space for Healing (1999), was made as a resting place for herself and her nation, for the confusion between retaining tradition and yet embracing a future that negotiates a raging capitalism. She created the symbiotic feeling of both a mosque and a hospital with stretchers laid out resembling prayer mats, and blackened, rusted tools running around the perimeter, that appear to be an Urdu script but in fact communicate nothing. This was a metaphorical 'space for healing'{{or|date=July 2025}}, as Hussain died just after finishing the work, and the work was made in thinking conceptually of joining the physical and the spiritual.{{cite journal|first=Swapnaa |last=Tamhane|title=Rummana Hussain|journal=In Order to Join - the Political in a Historical Moment|date=February–April 2015}}

• 1998, Art in General, Residency, New York, NY, US
• 1997, Artspace Studios, Residency, Bristol, UK
• 1996, Ministry of Human Resource Development Senior Fellowship (Visual Arts), New Delhi, India

Rummana was married to Ishaat Hussain, an Indian businessman and former interim chairman of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). They have a daughter, Shazmeen, who married Indian filmmaker Shaad Ali in 2006. The couple divorced in 2011. Shazmeen is currently married to and has a child with Rustom Lawyer.{{Cite news |title=Shaad Ali ties the knot again - Times of India |url=https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/shaad-ali-ties-the-knot-again/articleshow/17881882.cms |access-date=2022-11-12 |website=The Times of India |date=5 January 2013 |language=en}}

Rummana died of cancer on 5 July 1999. She was 47.{{Cite web |last=Sharma |first=Sanjukta |date=2015-03-21 |title=The heady art of Rummana Hussain |url=https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/XEdaKQFzGwo1kjKVkwsOiO/The-heady-art-of-Rummana-Hussain.html |access-date=2022-11-12 |website=www.livemint.com |language=en}}

{{Reflist}}

• [https://www.talwargallery.com/news/art-india5 Art India, "Look Back in Anger," August 2019]
• [https://www.talwargallery.com/news/artforum3 Artforum, January 2016.]
• [https://flash---art.com/2015/04/in-order-to-join-csmvs-and-goethe-institute-mumbai/ Flash Art, "In Order to Join CSMVS and Goethe-Institute / Mumbai", April 2015]
• [http://collection.qagoma.qld.gov.au/qag/imu.php?request=display&port=45001&id=28db&flag=ecatalogue&offset=0&count=default&view=details Rummana Hussain in the permanent collection of the Queensland Art Gallery].
• [http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/SpecialCollectionItem/3941 Art India, The Courage of Being Rummana], January–April 1999.
• [https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/18/nyregion/rummana-hussain-47-indian-conceptual-artist.html The New York Times, Rummana Hussain, 47, Indian Conceptual Artist], 18 July 1999.
• [https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/23/arts/art-guide.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm The New York Times, Rummana Hussain], 23 October 1998.
• [https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/16/arts/art-in-review-370037.html?gwh=B6252EC70AF7D9444909A0AB577CF4BE The New York Times, Rummana Hussain: In Order to Join], 16 October 1998.

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Category:1952 births

Category:1999 deaths

Category:20th-century Indian Muslims

Category:Women artists from Karnataka

Category:Indian political artists

Category:Artists from Bengaluru

Category:20th-century Indian women artists

Category:20th-century Indian painters

Category:Women installation artists

Category:Women video artists

Category:Painters from Karnataka