It’s not every day you find yourself riding on a giant tampon across a blood red lagoon, on your way to fight a cyclopean octopus with your bare hands. But here you are, on a journey of self-discovery – which also involves some intense face-offs with cruel teenagers and a grilling from your mother in your bedroom (to those who have grown up with south Asian parents, a trigger warning – this character is terrifyingly accurate).
Artist-activist Poulomi Basu has made a genre-bending playable artwork/ interactive virtual reality/ immersive animated film about a menstruating superhero, Maya. It would be easy to scoff at this, but Maya: The Birth of a Superhero, co-directed by Basu’s longtime collaborator CJ Clarke, is a fun and poignant coming-of-age romp that is genuinely empowering. Part superhero satire, part psychological thriller, Maya takes the participatory genre in a bold new direction.
Putting on the VR headset, you’re transported into a fantastical, dystopian version of London, where you become the eponymous modern day Maya, voiced by Charithra Chandran (Bridgerton’s Edwina Sharma). As the 30-minute odyssey unfolds, you move from the school classroom (and an excruciating scene where you get your period in front of your peers) to battling demons, and discovering the ancient wisdom of eastern philosophy via an illusory Maya of the past (narrated by Indira Varma, known for her role as Game of Thrones’ Ellaria Sand). As past and present collide in a mystical epiphany, you realise your monthly blood loss is a symbol of the perennial female life force. Shooting fire from hennaed hands, you go to face your nemesis – the giant octopus, a representation of the pain Basu experienced from endometriosis, which she has described as tentacles tightening around her womb.
There are some magical, painterly moments (the animation was hand drawn by Basu before it was sketched using Quill) with a tear-jerking original soundtrack by Bishi Bhattacharya. It is a staunchly feminist work, but it has a sense of humour. Whether you’ve menstruated or not, this brings you closer to what it’s like, and how it might be seen differently – as the film makes clear, menstruation is still globally stigmatised and, in many cultures, a taboo.
Basu’s previous work, Blood Speaks, managed to shift laws around menstrual exile, known as chhaupadi, practised in Nepal. While that piece took a documentary approach to show the conditions of a teenager with postpartum bleeding forced to live in a hut in exile, here Maya unites the experiences of women in the east and west, turning shame into a superpower.
Fireflies, Basu’s solo exhibition at East Gallery, Norwich, follows a different journey, but is preoccupied with the same destination – finding a place of emancipation, freedom and joy. Curated by Bindi Vora and first shown at Autograph, London, in 2022, Fireflies is a deeply personal body of work that deals with the global epidemic of domestic violence against women. For the first time in her work, Basu turned her camera on her mother and herself, both survivors of male violence. A series of staged portraits grapple with abuse and trauma that has been passed down generations, and how to find a way out of it. The photographs re-enact the physical and psychological pain; the violence at times takes you by surprise – a trickle of blood snaking quietly down a face from under a tangle of curls. In another image, we look down on Basu’s mother as she lies, her hair fanned out around her, eyes closed. A red flower is in her mouth. But there is nothing peaceful about the image – she is unseen and silenced.
Synthesising contentions about nature, gender and ecofeminism with Petrarchan motifs – photographs of naked bodies enveloped in landscapes that blaze with a strange celestial light, pictures of glaciers printed on gauzy, diaphanous sheets – Basu creates another journey with an eerie ambience. The sound of a speculative fiction film piece, presented across two screens, wraps around the testimony of a lone survivor who finds herself inhabiting a barren planet, evoking the way trauma affects the contours of existence, the perception of time and space. (It won the best experimental award at Aesthetica short film festival 2022.)
Here Basu begins to imagine a future – possibly as a cyborg in a postapocalyptic universe. This is heavy, hard-hitting stuff; it takes time to process the layers of what you’re seeing. But Basu has the ability to shapeshift, bending the medium to a message that becomes visceral and immediate. The most memorable image of Fireflies is a photograph of Basu and her mother, turned away from the camera, their bare arms and bodies intertwined. It’s a simple, defiant gesture of love and solidarity.
This is knotty and complex work that will not be for all. Not everyone appreciates virtual reality works, or other kinds of experimental image-making. And, let’s be frank, not everyone likes women. Whatever your opinion on either, this is galvanising, boundary-pushing art at its best.
• Poulomi Basu: Fireflies is at East Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts, 3 October-18 November. Maya: The Birth of a Superhero was at the V&A, London, as part of the Digital Design Weekend and will be released online in 2024.
