Jithinlal NR Wounds and Stars’,
This painting features a lean farmer with one leg swollen due to filariasis, Jithinlal, in a close-up of the same leg, shows wounds visualized as cracks. HR is from Kerala, the swollen leg represents caste oppression. Born into a middle-class family in Ernakulam, his father worked in the Railways as a section engineer. His parents had an inter-caste marriage.”
I Think ‘Dalit Art’ Is In A State Of Flux Which Changes And Can Accommodate A Lot Of Things Apart From Identity Discourse. I See It As A New Sensibility To Look At The World”
A key theme through her work is Water in all its aspects – as an integral part of the environment, as water bodies, as a contested resource, as the source of fauna and flora, as well as a substance of meditative and metaphorical power, said to be born in the stars. Parvathi is a founder-member of the art collective The Hashtag#Collective. She plays an active role - and is deeply committed to supporting - the emerging renaissance of the contemporary in Chennai. Parvathi is poet, fiction writer, and features correspondent who has written extensively on the arts for publications such as National Geographic, The Hindu, The Business Times, Singapore and The Jakarta Post. As a public speaker, her TEDx talks include ‘Seeing the world through Different Lenses’ (2016).
Pushpamala N was born in Bangalore, 1956. Pushpamala N has been called “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art”. In her sharp and witty work as a photo- and video-performance artist, sculptor, writer, curator and provocateur, and in her collaborations with writers, theatre directors and filmmakers, she seeks to subvert the dominant cultural and intellectual discourse. She is known for her strongly feminist work and for her rejection of authenticity and embracing of multiple realities. As one of the pioneers of conceptual art in India and a leading figure in the feminist experiments in subject, material and language, her inventive work in sculpture, conceptual photography, video and performance have had a deep influence on art practice in India.
Starting off her career as a sculptor, Pushpamala began using photography and video in the mid -1990s, creating tableaux and photo-romances in which she casts herself in various roles. Interested in history and the idea of cultural memory, she cites a wide range of references in her series of masquerades where she simultaneously inhabits and questions familiar frames from art history, photography, film, theatre and popular culture, thereby placing herself as the artist at the centre of social and political inquiry.
Prajakta Potnis painting, site-specific sculptural installations to public art interventions. In 2014 she was invited to participate in the Kochi -Muziris Biennale curated by Jitish Kalat, Kochi. Earlier that year her work was part of a show curated by Geeta Kapur titled Aesthetic Bind- Cabinet Closet Wunderkammer at the Chemould Art Gallery, Mumbai. Pontis was born 1980 is based in Mumbai. Her work explores the connections between intimate and public worlds, and the topographies that influence global politics and economics
Ranjeeta Kumari deftly navigates along the tender lines of home, memory and identity. Her work is a commentary on the drowned-out voices of marginalised women in our society. From the lack of acknowledgment of domestic labour they provide to their contribution in major revolutions in the country, the struggles and hopes of these women of the land continue to be ignored in our deeply patriarchal society. Inspired by Bhikhari Thakur, a theatre artist also known as the ‘Shakespeare of Bhojpur’, her works are a ‘poetry of resistance’ that embody the ‘intimate revolutions by women’, a phrase coined by the economist and author Shrayana Bhattacharya.
Ranjeeta Kumari born and brought up in Bihar, currently lives in Patna. She was recently selected to be a part of the exhibits ‘Plea to the Foreigner’ curated by Prabhakar Kamble for Biennale Africaine De La Photographie and ‘Viral Vacuum’ by art historian Mara Johanna Komel. Ranjeeta received her BA in painting from the College of Arts and Crafts in Patna in 2008 and graduated with a Masters in Fine Art (Research Programme) from the Shiv Nadar University in 2016.
"I took elements from their daily life such as their vibrant colorful attire, the sari and objects of daily household to represent the story. It is quite interesting and inspiring for me. These women use saris, in many ways other than draping, such as in Sujani, a traditional art form made out of old saris at home, to create another form of narrative storytelling.
My process includes collective community work. Old worn-out saris collected from the women of my neighborhood and my family are a representational portrait of them. Women singing traditional songs at home and a series of paintings of everyday household activity, the poetry of their lives and story of the resistance of women. These are the songs they sing while doing collective chores such as cooking, cleaning and making Sujani. The songs talk about the hardships and solidarity among these women but like their colorful saris, all is not grey in their songs. Under the veil of folk songs, the combined work tells the tale of domestic women labor from my homeland and the history of the migrant’s family left to fend for themselves. It examines how a domestic act can be transformed into an act of resistance, nourished by many folk tales and songs that expresses untold stories"
Reflections on trade and labour. Read more about Ranjeeta Kumari here…and here Ranjeeta Kumari
Amol K Patil, a performance artist, owes his artworks to his roots in Chawls, Mumbai’s housing projects where he was born and raised. 36-year-old Patil studied visual arts at the Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts.
Taking inspiration from his life in the chawl, Patil embarked on the project ‘What is Human Becomes Animal’, which brought to life the situations faced by sanitary workers in Mumbai. Patil also looks at the growth of Bombay into Mumbai, an overpopulated megapolis where the workers are dwarfed by the scaffolding of centralized urbanisation. Patil’s father was a Powada Sahir—a theatre artist, interpreter and poet who went from one village to another, telling stories from the epics and addressing various social issues such as the devastating effects of immigration and its traumas.
Yogesh Barve (b. 1989, Mumbai) based in Mumbai, makes exhibitions of objects drawings and videos that to reveal marginal histories an imagined use or the process of cultural transfer. Before going to art school in 2009, Barve studied to be a leather worker at a technical school, included of cleaning raw hide and leather, removing dead meat and blood, coloring and chemically altering the materials to create leather used in bags and shoes,. After art school Barve continued his knowledge of these processes of alteration of the materiality of the objects. Yogesh has been a member of Clark House Initiative, Bombay since 2012, and a co-Director of Clark House Initiative space between 2016-18.
Cop Shiva I started to document the complexity of rural and urban India, focusing on people and portraiture as a genre. I am fascinated with the idea of masquerade and the roles people play in public and private. One of my most acclaimed projects involved documenting the life of a rural school teacher, named Bagadehalli Basavaraj, as a Gandhi impersonator. This project has evolved to include a broader reach, which is to look at Gandhi’s ideals in contemporary India.
My portfolio also includes series of intimate portraits of urban migrants, people of alternative lifestyle, street performers and others living in the hinterland of urban and rural conflict. My ongoing projects continue to capture the diversity of humans who live on the edge and represent the spirit of our times.
Krishnaraj Chonat is a sculptor, installation and performance artist from Bangalore, a city that in the last decade has become synonymous with information technology in India. Notions of technology as progress, questionable methods of disposing hazardous waste, and the destruction of the environment through aggressive new development are some of the recurring issues he responds to. Through the juxtaposition of unconventional sculptural materials such as sandalwood soap and e-waste, Chonat offers cautionary, poetic and humorous insights on critical issues in contemporary Indian that are relavent throughout the world.
Through the use of unconventional and contrasting sculptural materials such as Mysore Sandalwood soap and e-waste, Krishnaraj Chonat layers memories of a more innocent past with “the other side of the story” – poor laborers dismantling hazardous waste. He continually questions notions of “progress” through technology and simulated versus real experiences in tourism and everyday life.
Varunika Saraf, an artist whose 76-panel installation We, The People (2018-22) won her recent critical acclaim at the Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (2023). Saraf acknowledges her mother and grandmother—both excellent embroiderers themselves—disapprove of the quality of her needlework. She learned the craft from her grandmother in secret, because her mother deeply resented needlework—just as I did, growing up. “Her version of feminism convinced her that needlework was pointless drudgery, a waste of the time that must be spent reading and learning. It was for the future she imagined for me, with all the possibilities that education presented,” Saraf wrote. “Despite their vocal differences, both agreed that my work was not up to their standards. They have an almost identical snarky look, a look of disapproval aimed at freezing the strongest of hearts. https://www.varunikasaraf.com/about/ varunika.saraf@gmail.com
Nilima Sheikh is known for her narrative and figurative paintings on the lives of women and minorities in India. Her practice reinterprets traditional art forms, borrowing stylistically from practices of miniature and scroll painting as well as theatre and poetry. A key member of the Baroda School, she is also one of the foremost women artists of her time alongside Nalini Malani, Arpita Singh and Madhvi Parekh.
Over the last six decades, Sheikh’s practice has been informed by sustained art historical research — a hallmark of the Baroda School — resulting in a narrative oeuvre that plays with established sequential formats. Her practice also consists of collaborations with other artists, such as in her use of text from the Gujarati folk songs that she was introduced to by her husband and fellow Baroda School member Gulammohammed Sheikh; her work with Shahzia Sikander on South Asian art traditions and politics; her work with sanjhi artists of traditional paper stencils in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh.
Bhasha Chakrabarti (b. 1991, Honolulu) graduated with an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2022. Indian-origin Yale School of Art MFA graduate who grew up in Hawaii, Chakrabarti’s ideology is centred on notions of “mending”, repair and repurposing while critiquing the legacies of colonialism and their continued sway. Read an interview with Bhasha here.
Dr. Kush Patel is a faculty member in the Postgraduate Arts Program in Technology and Change at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education in Bengaluru, where they also lead and steward the Just Futures Co-lab. They are a founding member of the Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed Collective.
This site is a selected record of my community-centered projects and pedagogies in the context of architecture and the digital public humanities. The published artifacts are structured around a set of interconnected engagements with questions of participatory politics, social production of space, anti-colonial digital praxis, and queer-feminist politics. Together, these selections work with and on forms of knowledge and expertise across voice and social difference. — Kush Patel, Ph.D.
Sharbendu De is a contemporary lens-based artist, academic and a writer, deeply invested in the climate and ecological discourse as well indigenous multispecies ecologies. Interested in ‘invisibility’ and the ‘invisibles,’ De constructs mise-en-scenes, often called ‘cinematic stills’ and ‘tableaux’s’ to critique the colonial gaze, and simultaneously push the limits of imaginaries. In doing so, he argues for a viewpoint beyond anthropocentrism serving as an invocation for us to urgently repair our fractured relationship with nature. As of date, he has created three conceptual bodies of work: An Elegy for Ecology (2016-21) a speculation on the human condition where estrangement from nature has amplified loneliness, solastalgia and eco-anxiety—turning the climate and ecological discourse domestic, Imagined Homeland (2013-19) on the indigenous Tibeto-Burman Lisu community’s philosophies and multispecies relationships with nature, and Between Grief and Nothing (2015-16) a portrayal of the psychological violence and trauma caused by the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. He is currently working on the sequel to An Elegy for Ecology as well as Man is not an Island (2020-ongoing) exploring anthropogenic entanglements, kinship making philosophies, eco-horrors and the positionality of the artist as self. Over the last 12 years, De has been teaching photography and visual communications across universities and cultural institutions in India. He is currently running an online program titled Decoding Anthropocene: Tackling Climate Crisis to support South Asian lens-based practitioners engaged with visual storytelling on the climate and ecological crisis. Image: Dzukou Valley, 2021 from the series An Elegy for Ecology.
Sajan Mani is an Interdisciplinary artist and curator hailing from a family of rubber tappers in a remote village in the northern part of Keralam, South India. His work voices the issues of marginalized and oppressed peoples of India, via the “Black Dalit body” of the artist. Mani’s performance practice insists upon embodied presence, confronting pain, shame, fear, and power. His personal tryst with his body as a meeting point of history and present opens onto “body” as socio-political metaphor.
Artist Viola Bordon examines the processes of touch, unmaking, and materially dictated aesthetics regarding her studio practice. The philosophical ideas of absence are used to establish a purpose for undoing, which is then explored as a learning process. This process is complicated by the sense of touch, resulting in formal aesthetics that are materially inspired. Viola is a Pennsylvania based interdisciplinary artist working in fibers, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing. Her work deals with themes of power, boundary, control, body, labor, faith, religion, and isolation.
Split between two countries, Aishwarya Arumbakkam uses her practice to maintain a close connection with her family back home in Chennai, India. Pained by this physical separation, she utilizes her work to diminish the presence of distance, and to lengthen the time she has left with aging loved ones. Through an arrangement of photography, video, printmaking, and drawing, Arumbakkam’s work addresses the complex experience of immigration, as well as the obstacles faced when attempting to preserve meaningful relationships with loved ones from afar. Using the ambiguities and irregularities of online imaging, Arumbakkam explores the space between seeing and not seeing, touching and not touching, being present and being out of reach. Through this tension, Arumbakkam conveys her own guilt and agony over starting a new life halfway around the world. Yet, through touching moments of vulnerability and sincerity, she strengthens the bonds with those she has left back home.
Anuja Ghosalkar is the founder of Drama Queen, a documentary theatre company in Bangalore. Through Drama Queen, she is evolving a unique form of Documentary theatre in India. The focus of her theatre practice is undocumented narratives, archival absences and gender. Research, oral history and iterations around form and process are critical to her performance and pedagogical work. At Srishti she conceived a site specific, performance at Cubbon Park Metro Station called Dream Walkers.
I Promise The Bearer…This solo performance takes us through the everyday journey of a female artist in India: Her dreams, desires, and struggles to be an artist in a rapidly changing social landscape. The show takes on the exotic stereotypes of India in the West playfully. But the lighthearted tone of “what it means to be an artist” in the complex and murky terrain of funding and “white money”,
Indu Antony is based out of Bangalore, India. Born and raised in a conventional Indian family from Kerala, India, she overcame various social obligations to pursue her forms of expressions. She has hence been working with individuals from the fringes of the society. She is known to explore tonalities of inward discussions which later on bursts out into the communal spaces. Her work comprises of understanding feministic stands which gives way to performances and installations.
Cecilia’ed looks at disrupting normative notions of gender in public spaces by working with neighbourhood spaces that are marked ‘unsafe’ for women, using the politics of herd mentality and celebrity culture. Taking Bangalore as the locus of the project, she has identified obsolete spaces like salons and bars, gendered spaces specifically, and intends to reopen them through a ceremonial show using Cecilia, a local figure of emancipation and bravura.
Lavanya Mani, Bangalore and Vadodara based artist, harnesses traditional Indian craft and textile techniques of kalamkari, embroidery, tie and dye, appliqué, batik etc. in conjunction with painting on cloth. Whilst re-envisioning the histories of colonial power dynamics and trade in her unique textile language, she powerfully creates a new narrative with the cloth as the storyteller. Often questioning the ideas of the ‘Orient’, she has recontextualised Victorian travellers stories through her lens of discovering dye-making. Fearlessly embracing the politics surrounding a self-taught contemporary artist using a traditionally male dominated art form of Kalamkari to create wider statements in her artistic journey, Mani continues to bring in the pertinent transition between ‘high art’ and ‘craft’ and continues to explore more.
Amar Kanwar's films and multi-media works explore the politics of power, violence and justice. His multi-layered installations originate in narratives often drawn from zones of conflict and are characterised by a unique poetic approach to the personal, social and political. A Season Outside (1997)
There is perhaps no border outpost in the world quite like Wagah, the border between India and Pakistan, where this film begins its exploration. An outpost, where every evening, people are drawn to a thin white line… and probably anyone in the eye of a conflict could find themselves here.
Kadak Design Collective
When eight women living across the world came together to question through their art what it means to be a woman in India, Kadak was born. The design collective works with graphic storytelling, challenging preconceived notions about femininity and sexuality, and redefining the narratives that surround it. Inspired by a matchbox emblazoned with the name, Kadak defines not only their purpose but each of the eight women—strong, severe, sharp. ‘Kadak came together as a response to a call for submissions to The East London Comics and Arts Festival earlier this year. We realised we were a community of women graphic artists - which was a minority in and of itself, and additionally all from India, which narrowed the pool even more.
Navjot Altaf
Cognitive Processes
Imagining Ecological Democracy
we place Navjot Altaf’s latest series, Cognitive Processes: Imagining Ecological Democracy that has evolved from her responses during home confinement in the Covid crisis - while finding hope and agency in interconnectness, reciprocity, and a circular ‘kincentric’ ecology. During the ‘pause’ that the pandemic created, there has been a paradoxical clash of excruciating situations that we have witnessed in our social life and on our television and digital screens. Caste, class, racial, gender, and policy struggles amplified within the pandemic: migrant families have walked numerous kilometres on our highways amid the internal travel bans - encountering hunger, accidents, loss, and sheer exhaustion to reach their homes.
A self-taught artist, Bhupen Khakhar was born in Bombay on the 10th of March 1934. He joined the Art Criticism course at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda where he started painting and became involved with the seminal Narrative- Figurative movement. Khakhar’s work has been characterized by a rare irreverence and a lack of inhibition about his lack of formal training. Indeed, he has been able to evolve his own mode of address that harnesses this lack of training to provide an edge to his expressions. Khakhar’s interest in ‘degenerate’ forms of art led him to an exploration of artistic conventions in hybrid traditions that operate in the interregnum between classical miniatures and European illusionism. A deliberate naivete is visible in his paintings from the 1970s, coupled with a deeply felt sympathy with his subjects, who are often ordinary folk caught in an existence they do not quite understand.
The St+art India foundation is a not-for-profit organization that works on art projects in public spaces. The aim of the foundation is to make art accessible to a wider audience by taking it out of the conventional gallery space and embedding it within the cities we live in - making art truly democratic and for everyone.
A self-taught artist, Bhupen Khakhar was born in Bombay on the 10th of March 1934. He joined the Art Criticism course at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda where he started painting and became involved with the seminal Narrative- Figurative movement. Khakhar’s work has been characterized by a rare irreverence and a lack of inhibition about his lack of formal training. Indeed, he has been able to evolve his own mode of address that harnesses this lack of training to provide an edge to his expressions. Khakhar’s interest in ‘degenerate’ forms of art led him to an exploration of artistic conventions in hybrid traditions that operate in the interregnum between classical miniatures and European illusionism. A deliberate naivete is visible in his paintings from the 1970s, coupled with a deeply felt sympathy with his subjects, who are often ordinary folk caught in an existence they do not quite understand.
A self-taught artist, Bhupen Khakhar was born in Bombay on the 10th of March 1934. He joined the Art Criticism course at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda where he started painting and became involved with the seminal Narrative- Figurative movement. Khakhar’s work has been characterized by a rare irreverence and a lack of inhibition about his lack of formal training. Indeed, he has been able to evolve his own mode of address that harnesses this lack of training to provide an edge to his expressions. Khakhar’s interest in ‘degenerate’ forms of art led him to an exploration of artistic conventions in hybrid traditions that operate in the interregnum between classical miniatures and European illusionism. A deliberate naivete is visible in his paintings from the 1970s, coupled with a deeply felt sympathy with his subjects, who are often ordinary folk caught in an existence they do not quite understand.
Shunya Group formed in 2012. The four artists, along with Yogesh Barve, Nikhil Raunak. Rupali Patil, Amol Patil, Poonam Jain. The group of seven is essentially an offshoot of the Clark house initiative, and alternative art space in Colaba formed by two Mumbai based curators, Sumesh Sharma and zasha Colah.