Visual Art Showcase

In the words of Chandrima Bhattacharyya – Exhibit Curator

The women of choice for this year’s Rasa Festival are very varied in their approach to their work, but the common point of interest that drew me to them is their absolute and complete connection with something deep inside their artistic instinct, that is primeval. Not every artist can touch base with this innermost part of their beings, and harmonize their creative instincts with it, and to me these six artists have done so in this particular selection of their work.

Aditi Ganeev Sangwan from Chandigarh, is an artist who breathes and lives her art, to the extent that she birthed her first of the series of this body of work consequently with her having a c-section for her 2nd child. That too at a large scale. She has incorporated her life into her work, literally, by involving her little children to participate in her projects of the works displayed here.

Archana Rajguru, comes from Assam; and though she could have followed a more lucrative and prestigious career as an animator from a reputed studio, or as a faculty member of the prestigious design institute NID of Amdabad, she chose to relinquish all that to follow the pull to her heart strings by working with yarns, and creating invisible people with visible textile faces with strong characters.

Lala Rukh Selim (Todi) from Dhaka, Bangladesh, is an intensely feminist artist who, like many of her contemporaries, has been witness to the horrendous atrocities women were subjected to during her country’s struggle for freedom. Like them her psyche has been wounded and scarred, if not directly, but as a conscientious and compassionate woman. Her work, primarily sculpture, has borne that mark. In the current body of work, she has broken away completely from medium and expression and created something remarkable by just scribbling on photos. It’s the concept and it’s outcome that stuns the viewer.

Priyanka Bardiya‘s artistic soul belongs in the Jurassic age, it appears. Every plant and bird or animal form she creates is so primitive in its form and sensibility, that one wonders from what depth of consciousness does she draw them out to give her forms such astonishingly animated feeling of life. It’s a very unique language of art that Priyanka has created, that’s completely personal, aesthetically intriguing and very vibrantly alive.

Saraswati Renata is a Russian who migrated to India in 2004 and has been living and working in Auroville, Pondicherry since then. Saraswati is unique amongst this group because she started working in the ceramic medium from the age of 12, even having a solo show at the age of 19. Having started so young, something of the child has remained in her work, and her creations are delightful paradoxes of a charmingly juvenile sensibility and a mature understanding of the medium and life in general. The combination creates deceptively simple looking but complex constructions of structures that appear to be houses made by a child, yet the elements occupying the insides are maturely handled and put together – a happy combination of both, making her language, again, uniquely vulnerable and strong at the same time.

Sudatta Basu Roy Chowdhury‘s works are tender expressions of her travails in life. They express the pain of living and real wounds in picturesque arrangements of symbolic elements that make them attractive and vibrant yet visceral in feeling.