With an art practice that centres around photo and video performance, in addition to sculpture, writing and curation, Pushpamala N’s work reenacts and reconstructs history to interrogate stereotypes about gender, race and caste, offering a critical commentary on India’s modernity from a postcolonial perspective. Through her photographic recreations of popular images, such as stills from Indian films or of Raja Ravi Varma’s oleographs and calendar images, she plays with cultural memory to present a copy that subverts the idea of the original.

Born in Bengaluru, Pushpamala studied economics at Bangalore University from 1976–77. It was during this time that she joined evening classes in art conducted by Balan Nambiar, whose mentorship led to her obtain a Master’s degree in sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda (now Vadodara), in 1985. Here, she discovered the works of artists such as Bhupen Khakhar, Raghav Kaneria and KG Subramanyan, who would later become major influences in her practice.

Pushpamala began working with photography, video and performance in the mid-1990s through tableaux and photo-romances that featured herself in a variety of roles. As an artist who points her camera at the past, her work recreates various personas that appeal to the popular imagination. In Phantom Lady (1996–98), Pushpamala posed around Mumbai as a character based on Mary Ann Evans, popularly known as Fearless Nadia, one of the first white women to enter Indian cinema as a stunt actress. This re-invocation of Evans challenged the conflation of the action genre with the masculine. Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2004), produced in collaboration with Claire Arni and aided by a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), examined ethnographic photography as a colonial tool, investigating the intersection of caste and race. By dressing up as colonial subjects and reenacting their subjugation, Pushpamala called into question the aesthetic archetypes of the colonial gaze. The project repositioned the subject (here, the native informant) at the centre with the aim of inverting the subject–object relationship and critiquing the colonial regime’s obsession with classification.