Shivangi is a rising visual artist, founder of India Printmaking House, and curator of the new Echoes exhibition being held at the Nehru Centre in Mayfair on the 4th March in honour of International Women’s Day. For the first time, a collection of thought-provoking diasporic female-centric art will be displayed at the institution, exploring the “intimate connection between women, identity, memory, migration and displacement,” to depict the experience of global South-Asian femininity in its complex entirety. This is emphasised through the multidimensional mediums where the works shown range from sculpture and natural materials to paper, drawing and painting. Shivangi, whose work will be one of the six diverse award-winning artists to be featured, shared with us: “Specifically, we wanted to showcase the art of women who had roots in India but also travelled a lot. We wanted to depict the profound idea of the negotiation of memories of home, forming of a contemporary sense of belonging and the unique selfhood which results. My work, for example, is a large-scale screen print delving into migration where a migrant worker, Birma, is shown caught pondering the meaning of life in a foreign land. I use a lot of female figures in my work and animals as a metaphor to engage with the idea of memory e.g. during study, I found this dead bird and was inspired to create a large drawing of these sparrows – I grew up with them and always used to see these birds around me. When I came here, there was a real sense of loss which is communicated in the amplification.”
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The intuitive relationship between individual women and external place is then central to the project. Bina, another prestigious artist, who is exhibiting at Echoes presents prints which are “a series of experimental monotypes inspired by the Valentia Island Slate Quarry during her winter residency in Ireland.” She is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is site based and she often uses natural earth pigments collected from the location to help tell her story, by making her own paint and printmaking inks to echo and colours of the place. Artist, Meghana G. moved to the UK two years back. She has been fascinated by the idea of architectural elements and household objects holding their own memories:” In my view certain spaces from our homes exist not only external to our being, but also as a part of our identity. They come to us again and again in memories and dreams”.
Artist, Richa, produces a pastel and ink work on tracing and stone paper which reconciles “the differences between where she grew up and the London life which have been significant. One can walk through this work experiencing light and shade enjoying the rhythmic calm confluence of both worlds”. In the work ‘Fading Memories’ she is constantly playing with past and present using layered drawing techniques. It enables truthful following of feelings which are sometimes clear or sometimes blurred. Anushiya, who is a multidisciplinary artist, depicts her journey from Sri Lanka to Northern Ireland where “the work is a part of a series of installations, created by dry point printmaking on Japanese paper, that shows the narrative of life”, and Rewati’s ceramic sculptures “embody the dichotomy of diaspora. At once solid and fluid, clay is pulled upwards as if out of the earth, torn and recast, given new life and new form, just as shifts in human geography have recast notions of belonging based on place, history and identity.” The series is also a personal reflection. The sculptures evoke the symbolic topography of India’s desert border with Pakistan, across which Rewati’s family travelled after Partition. Anushiya’s works are a part of multidimensional installations influenced by identity, nature, culture and conflict.
Additionally, Anna Moszynska has been invited as Chief Guest. She is a London-based lecturer and writer, specialising in contemporary art. Anna has reviewed over 30 exhibitions for BBC Radio, and written numerous essays and catalogues on female artists. Her books include Abstract Art and Sculpture Now published by Thames & Hudson and Antony Gormley Drawing for the British Museum. Here, Shivangi commented on her personal experience of shifting female identity in nomadic modern times which beautifully summarises the sentiment of the dynamic collective force behind the Echoes exhibit: “Ultimately, I do wish to provide a different perspective on identity beyond the physical structures of the body – beyond race, gender and caste which are superficial markers of the self and so become barriers. I want to look more inwards where there is an inherent oneness. Although the artists in the show are all very different, for example, there is an interesting recurring of themes through certain lines and repetition itself. Another work I did, dubbed Self-portrait, further looked microscopically inside the body in a way that fascinatingly reflects the arrangements of the universe and images of space. I used a lot of female forms moving from the darkness into the light which become increasingly abstract.”
Indeed, the underlying universality of human existence seems to reflect the wider rhythm of expansive life. Shivangi stated: “our identities are fluid and not stagnant or constant as implied by traditional definition. I hope to introduce this new freeing perspective through the emotive art that will be displayed.” Finally, Echoes invites people to peer into deep reflections of nuanced worldly travel captured through the cross-cultural lens of feminine introspection. Not only does the exhibition collapse the boundaries of time and space but moreover challenges mental assumptions about reductive South-Asian womanhood to feelingly open the mind. The curator concluded: “the works carry a signature boldness and delicacy and are internally authentic.” Shivangi’s platform, India Printmaking House, is a not-for-profit which supports South-Asian female artists by offering residencies and opportunity, including prizes that encourage otherwise underrepresented talent, such as the Young Printmaker Award. Shivangi herself recently received the Global Talent Award from the Arts Council England. For more information, please visit:
