The banality of celebrating women and cooking and art: What a Hyderabad exhibition gets wrong

‘Cooking Up A Storm: Her Sojourn’ must be the most offensive, anti-feminist art exhibition of recent times. Koeli Mukherjee Ghose, a woman artist herself, brings together 12 women artists, including herself, from Hyderabad for a show on cooking. “While many of us working ladies [sic] cooked and cooked [sic] during the pandemic with pleasure or pain,” she writes, “it was necessary to take the creative car [clearly only bourgeois car-owning women matter to Mukherjee Ghose] back on the road.” The dichotomy Mukherjee Ghose creates between cooking and creativity re-introduces the sexist, patriarchal idea that cooking is not creative, it is women’s work and it does not really matter. Only what is done in studios matters. That this comes from a woman artist who wants to celebrate women artists is shocking. This offensiveness aside, the show claims to “celebrate women” per se. Down the road in Kerala, a gaggle of women artists were asked to paint Savarkar and they gladly agreed. What’s really there to celebrate about women or women artists like this? This is the mindless culture of sarkari feminism that has afflicted cultural and other spheres. If it is a woman, let’s celebrate her. [caption id=“attachment_9473111” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] From ‘Cooking Up A Storm’. Screengrab from Goethe Zentrum Hyderabad virtual exhibition, via art.kunstmatrix.com[/caption] To me, the absence from this show of the most interesting woman artist in Hyderabad is telling. I have in mind the figure of Varunika Saraf who through the pandemic has sketched and painted some of the most powerful work on cultures of protest, migrancy, destitution, illness and death. From migrants walking through the pandemic to farmers protesting in Delhi, from the women in Shaheen Bagh to the people caught in the Hyderabad floods, Saraf sketched it all. What’s more, Saraf always generously shares the work of other artists and photographers from across the country. She curates all this on her Instagram page , which has been one of the most interesting art galleries I visited this year. That Mukherjee Ghose does not include her is revealing. This is a show about cooking and domestic spaces, cutesy women cooking, not politics and nothing really about the pandemic. Saraf is also an art historian with a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She studied in Hyderabad and Delhi and returned to the city she loves years ago, a proud Hyderabadi if ever there was one. Yet, there is nothing intellectual to Mukherjee Ghose’s framing of this show and nothing particularly Hyderabadi about it. That Saraf would not care that she was not included may be obvious and beside the point. That she would have baulked at the exhibition’s conceptualisation is almost certain. That she would have supported all the women artists in the show is almost as certain. [caption id=“attachment_9473121” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] From ‘Cooking Up A Storm’. Screengrab from Goethe Zentrum Hyderabad virtual exhibition, via art.kunstmatrix.com[/caption] Cooking itself involves labour, sweat (sometimes blood), repetitive drudgery and deep pleasure. Like all things, it is a mixed bag and it is often pushed exclusively onto women. None of the labour and complexity of cooking is in the show. Indeed, cooking hardly features in the show which makes the title even more senseless. Mukherjee Ghose puts some of her own cooked dishes on display as artworks, and, from the looks of it, her cooking is as bad as her art. Walking through the exhibition left me cold. It made me wish all the artists had just stayed in the kitchens. The poor quality of the art cannot be excused just because these are women and I am being asked to celebrate them. [caption id=“attachment_9473141” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] From ‘Cooking Up A Storm’. Screengrab from Goethe Zentrum Hyderabad virtual exhibition, via art.kunstmatrix.com[/caption] We need to re-think a feminism that is so shallow that it demands a mindless celebration of one sex and gender no matter what they do or do not do. We also need to re-conceive our idea of the political. If it means exclusive domesticity and lack of engagement with those on the roads and dying in a pandemic, then our conception of the political needs help. We also need to re-think our conception of art and how art mediates the domestic, the culinary and the pandemic. ‘Cooking Up A Storm: Her Sojourn’ is online at the Goethe Zentrum, Hyderabad till 3 April. View here .