With Mementos from Moments, artist Chandrima Bhattacharyya appears to construct collective feminine experience through her form

Artist Chandrima Bhattacharyya’s body of works in ‘Mementos from Moments’ is highly personal. The exhibition presents a tapestry of richly intertwined stories, personalised myths, and evocative commentaries that embody the complex and multi-layered world of a woman. 

The paintings and ink drawings come to life through the artist’s symbolic visual language, in which intricately juxtaposed forms and colours perform varied meanings, drawing the viewer into spaces that merge the real and imaginary.

Chandrima has been drawing and painting for the past three decades. She has been exposed to many cultures of the world during the time and imbibed the humanity-based philosophy of Tagore’s pedagogy, living at Santiniketan. For her, sitting down to work every day is like daily meditation that ends as a catharsis of the travails of life.

“The skin of an artist, especially a woman artist, is painfully stretched thin over her consciousness, like an overblown balloon, that a pinprick of malice, hurtful gossip, social stigma can burst and shatter to ground zero and underneath. I create my works from that miasma of pain born out of my variously covertly or overtly abused sexuality. The numerous, almost daily committed assaults on women deeply distress me, and images churn inside me to burst forth, but my consciousness doesn’t know quite how to express the enormity of despair and pain,” says Bhattacharyya.

“References to certain narratives and figures from literature and folklore, popular culture or art history (from ‘Alice in wonderland’ to ‘Bani Thani’ from Rajput folklore, and others) become protagonists in the artworks, as Bhattacharyya rescripts their stories to address vital discourses on justice. She integrates an understanding of past, present, and future, in sequences that unravel slowly, and perhaps in accordance with the viewer’s interpretation,” reads the curatorial note.

Some of the paintings record atrocities, like acid attacks or other violent forms of patriarchy, both directly and subtly talking about the burdens of female existence. For the artist, the work contains an element of autobiography, as her self-portrait enters the picture-plane in the guise of different personalities. She appears to construct collective feminine experience through her form and to mediate universal thoughts and actions within her process.

Neelam Malhotra, the curator of the show, says “Chandrima’s works are highly sensitive. It feels as though she pours her heart out into her works. The concern is with the ongoing sufferings of women from all walks of life, which does not seem to alarm or awaken from its slumber. Our society as a whole, not enough.”

(The exhibition can be viewed at the website of Ampas Art Gallery till May 10)

(Cover: Chandrima Bhattacharyya’s Theory of Beauty and The Beast )