I am no torchbearing feminist and would describe my work as feminine. I have been able to translate newer perceptions into our works, make the space to cohabit.
I object to the term ‘woman artist’. I am an artist. Also I do not see myself as a crusader. Each artist learns from her own individual journey..
NOVEL PERSPECTIVES: Uncertain Eggs by Manisha Parekh made with handmade paper on board and silk
–Manisha Parekh
–Sheila Makhijani
SOUL SPEAK: Works by Sheila Makhijani (clockwise from top left) Scuttle — I am a Big One and Flapping Around Will Not Help
Elegance and minimalism mark the works of Manisha, she creates rhythm and harmony by repeating motifs, producing a rich texture as she moves along with strings or beads. With a post-graduation from the College of Art in Delhi Sheila moved on to study art in Japan. Based in the capital, she has won acclaim at home and abroad for the sheer energy of her abstract forms revealing colour and line. Delving in the ‘global’, Anjum gives meaning to everyday and somewhat mundane objects, building layer upon layer in sculpture, installation and painting. Not all artists of the new order consider social consciousness or expression of it in the post-modern age as ‘sinful’. An artist who has explored culture and society most evocatively in her works is Saba Hasan who began painting the arch and the dome of the Hauz Khas madrassa in New Delhi. She has matured into a
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sensitive artist, combining images, objects and Urdu calligraphy to create works of impact trying to fight the stereotypes surrounding Muslims. “Art and life are for me simultaneously about the personal as well as about cultural contact, about experiencing the other. Urdu is an inalienable part of the many layers of my identity and our larger Asian culture. So its use here is a conscious choice probably as a political construct, my personal resistance to the global wave,” says Saba. Sonia Khurana is a visual media artist, working in the area between video, photography, performance, installation and public art. Her use of her own body, facing an unstable camera in the flapping fluid movements of a bird are a comment on the stereotypes imposed by society on a woman’s body. The woman and her body are also explored with a touch of erotica by Mithu Sen who very often places her own sensuous
MYRAID EXPRESSIONS: Two untitled works using mixed media by Mithu Sen
I wish I’d been an artist in the 1970s, when being a feminist was glamorous, but I was born carrying the gene of feminism. Yet I’m still labelled as a feminist artist.
–Mithu Sen
dusky face in her works. “I wish I’d been an artist in the 1970s, when being a feminist was glamorous and contemporary. Today I’m still stamped as a feminist artist. Why don’t we cultivate some new labels?” When it comes to the self and the world, an artist who has excelled, through using the camera, is Bengaluru-based Pushpamala N. She began with terracotta and won the Trienalle award as a young artist for her delightful sculptures of pigs. But as she moved along, she decided to discard ‘ham’ for all times and became her own subject in photographs, first making herself the heroine of Bollywood hits and then moving on to more complex ethnographic imagery in collaboration with photographer Claire Arni. In today’s age then what does it mean being a woman artist? “It is difficult to say what it would be otherwise. My observations and my choices are because I am a woman. So my art too is obviously the result of that. However, when I create my art, my being a woman does not play an important role at all,” ruminates Anjum. So what is this artistic journey all about? Sheila sums it up: “There maybe only a handful of people who can read between the lines of what an artist is actually trying to say but whether you are a woman or a male artist it’s all been worth it.” Maybe that is why the works of these women artistes are sometimes engaging, sometimes marvellous but always refreshing.
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