Shilpa Nikam
Visual Artist
Icon
Repetitive chanting prayers. I employed the very same scripture / religious value of the letters to connect challenging concepts pertaining to icon making and icon breaking. My installation work in the show, talks about that very philosophy. The large religious text on the pedestal and the work with the text from the Bhagavad Gita .Together illustrate that no matter which scripture you read through. Tolerance and acceptance.
Installation view , My grant 2018
Installation view , My grant 2018
Tavadi
Childhood I have seen my family use this mud vessel and it’s significance has defined the very basis of survival. I belong to a family of trader, in Gujarat. Tavadi is closest to me and family history. I have painted on its outer surface in my style. The subjects varied from images of harbors, flanges and drying fishes on lines, to a portrait of my grandfather and his boats, his writing from his account books of various ledgers, textual references form the spiritual pursuits of the Vaishnava chants that we follow, to numerous religious scriptures and hymns which I have heard since childhood.
Dehleez - The Threshold
When the line of control crosses over from the political or public into the private and the personal, the impact is more multilayered. In a familial situation the burden of one ego, imbalances the delicate balance of the home. Here the artist extrapolates the movement of lines of control taking birth in a very personal realm and then proliferating by leaps and bounds to the public and social realms. But Nature has its own lines of control and imposes them when needed. Women are the embodiment of Nature, is what the artist relates to in this installation work. If nothing can stop nature from crossing lines of control, then why would women be far behind.
If merely being born a girl itself is seen as a line of control in patriarchal mindsets, then it is time to deny and defy such systems and move out. In this installation made with organic and natural elements, the artist depicts an area of sand and an larger area of mud, separated by a Dehleez - The Threshold, the entrance to a home, decorated as an invitation to all the gods and goddesses of prosperity especially Goddess Lakshmi, by imprinting her footsteps facing inward. The work shows a pair of footprints of a woman (the artist’s ) moving from the sand area, an arid infertile zone, crossing over the threshold, into a zone of growth and prosperity. The foot prints on the wet mud outside sprout vegetation as a symbol of creativity. This is a portrayal of the woman going out of her shackled existence and negotiating her role in the house, society and the world.
Installation view , Line of Control 2015,
BIRLA Academy of art and culture
Virtual Exhibition - Installation view
Under his ‘I’
Women's March is an art installation where the terracotta pots play the role of the 'womb'. In our world, the womb is interpreted in many of ways and some of them are subject to religious, political, mythological, cultural and economical identities. The womb is rarely seen as belonging to the woman. In my art work I have tried to bring aspects of the glorification, misogyny, abuse and even mutilation of this part which houses life itself. This march is against all the interpretations of the womb, an outcry to demolish objectifying the woman and the womb.