Bengaluru, KARNATAKA / Mumbai, MAHARASHTRA :

Rummana Hussain, a painter and conceptual artist who was also active in Indian politics, died on July 5 at her home in Bombay. She was 47.

The cause was cancer, said the photographer Ram Rahman, a friend.

Ms. Hussain, who came from a prominent Muslim family in Bombay, was for much of her career a painter of allegorical figurative subjects. But political events in India, particularly the destruction of a mosque by Hindu militants in the city of Ayodhya in 1992 and the subsequent attacks on Muslims, spurred her into political action and changed the direction of her work.

She participated in demonstrations protesting both the Ayodhya incident and growing religious nationalism in India. She developed a photo-based feminist art that brought images of ruined architecture, land and the female body together in pointed combinations.

As an artist in residence at Art in General, an alternative space in Manhattan, she created a video-based installation last fall. Titled ”In Between,” the video combined images of Bombay with others of South Asian immigrant life in New York and alternated shots of the artist under treatment in a Manhattan hospital with others of her walking across the Queensboro Bridge wearing the tinkling ankle bells of an Indian classical dancer.

Ms. Hussain showed widely in India and in Europe

She is survived by her husband, Ishaat, and a daughter, Shazmin.

source: http://www.nytimes.com / The New York Times / Home> N.Y./ Region / by Holland Cotter / July 18th, 1999