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The Black Mamba – Natasha Mendonca & Suman Sridhar
Venue: KW Institute for Contemporary Art
The Black Mamba – Natasha Mendonca & Suman Sridhar
Founded 2012 in Mumbai, IN
Natasha Mendonca, born 1978 in Mumbai – lives and works in Mumbai
Suman Sridhar, born 1982 in Mumbai – lives and works in Mumbai
Land of the Breasted Woman, a live cinema performance by The Black Mamba featuring Suman Sridhar and Natasha Mendonca, is a queer feminist interrogation of gender, caste, and colonial oppression in India. The legendary Nangeli was an early nineteenth-century freedom fighter from Kerala who was hunted and murdered in a “suiciding” by the European colonizers, the ruling Indian upper caste, and aristocracy of her time for protesting the British-imposed colonial “breast tax.” Lower-caste women were forced to pay a fee in order to cover themselves in public. The bra and saree blouse are Victorian impositions on the Asian female body via taxation. Photographs from the colonial archives reveal a Victorian morality in their gaze. The Upper Cloth Mutiny, or Channar Revolt, one of the earliest documented anti-caste rebellions, abolished the colonial breast tax and was sparked by Nangeli’s life and death. Archival stills and 16mm film footage form the backdrop to poetry, narration, and songs spanning genres of hip-hop, Indian classical music, opera, experimental soundscapes, and field recordings that underscore the clash between oral history and colonial discourses. Who has the power to record the past, and whose account gets remembered? Land of the Breasted Woman is a contemporary funeral lament inspired by the South Asian oppari oral folk tradition of professional female mourners. The ode to the loss of an indigenous woman is a subversion of the tradition that is reserved for mourning the upper-caste male deceased, a performative deconstruction of colonialism and war as trafficking.
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