Playhouse of Her Mind

CURATORIAL NOTE

Playhouse of Her Mind dwells upon memories, metaphors, allegories, dreamscapes, among other forms, to confront the notions of appropriation of present-day realities and future possibilities. Bringing together strong female voices from the annals of art history, this exhibition focuses on the mechanisms of erasure and its ramifications through the artists’ lived experiences. It is about artists giving the amorphousness of space, physical dimensions through shape, colour, form and structure, to accentuate its experience and meaning.

Bakula Nayak uses vintage blueprints (of factory drawings) to represent the irreverent human construction and manufacturing processes, calling for a change from anthropocentricism to biocentrism where all forms of life have an intrinsic value. Gopa Trivedi’s sensibilities are deeply rooted in the Indian Miniaturist traditions, where she attempts to re-infuse and often re-contextualize miniature court styles by fusing traditional painting methods with new media. Pranati Panda plays with different materials, techniques, patterns, and textures to explore the fragility of mind, a sense of wonder about the working of one’s memory and about the visible and the invisible. Revati Sharma Singh brings forth intricate assemblages working with a variety of textural surfaces. She uses the language of grains, the language of food, the language of hunger and that of abundance, it’s the language we all speak despite our differences in race, colour, class or religion. Shalina Vichitra traces the spaces uncharted as complex cartographic like terrains. Her works are simply chronicles which frame any piece of land, a chunk, markings on its surface, its layers and the patterns in the overall fabric of the Earth. Shalini Dam turns materials like terracotta to illusionistic surfaces which problematize the monolithic binaries and explore the contradictions, the dualities that lie hidden under the surface.

The hyper-presence of textures in all these works exude a certain kind of tangibility, while bringing out the significance of materiality in empowering the self-expression. In an increasingly polarized world, existing in binaries, where conscious division on the basis of identity has become the norm, this exhibition can be read in multiple ways. It is a palpable rendition of character in a feeling, a frame of mind, a visceral response; an adjective that makes tangible as metaphor, elusive ideas or the texture of a distant memory. It represents more than a physical faculty.