New Delhi

Highlighting feminist concerns

‘Falling Girl’: A painting by Catherine Mosley.

New Delhi: Cutting across boundaries and cultures is an exhibition of five renowned women artists that opens at Gallery Espace in New Friends Colony beginning this coming Saturday.

Titled “Moving Beyond the Frame: A Space for Alternative Readings”, the exhibition explores alternative concerns with femininity. It will be on till January 13, 2009.

The participating artists are Maxine Henryson, Catherine Mosley and Jaishri Abichandani from the US, Sutapa Biswas from UK and Paula Sengupta from India, who have used collages and printmaking, sculpture and installations, photography and drawings to highlight that one’s identity is in a constant flux.

Kolkata-based artist Paula Sengupta, who largely works in the genre of the autobiographical narrative, addresses issues of feminist concern through her works. “The present body of work addresses the lump in my throat, the numbness in my veins, and the loss in my heart for a land long lost,” says Paula. Her usage of everyday objects like cloth, lacework, crochet and furniture transforms the exhibited area into an intimate domestic space.

In her diary-shaped installations, Paula narrates her family stories to showcase miseries faced by her family during the Partition of Bengal and Hindu-Muslim riots in 1947.

The female protagonist in Paula’s work assumes a bigger dimension in Catherine’s six collage paintings that employ human images and animal forms to convey the stressed notions of the victim and the predator.

Explaining how she creates artistic impressions, Catherine says she first prints her collage material using stencil, mono-printing, transfer processes and woodcut and then aims towards the close merging of the paint and paper materials to bring out a display of opacity and translucency.

While the works of Paula and Catherine highlight their extensive background in printmaking, Maxine captures simple and archetypal images in her camera’s viewfinder. A freelance photographer who keeps roving between the cultural landscapes of New York City, Europe and South Asia, her subject matter revolves around trees, rivers, clotheslines, women, children and temples.

Feminism also marks artist, social worker and founder of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, USA-based Jaishri Abichandani’s work. Finally, UK’s Sutapa Biswas explores the themes of time, history, gender, race and human condition through her works.

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu