Different concerns of socially sensitive artists highlighted

Dayanita Singh’s works have been presented in exhibitions throughout the world, most recently as a solo show at the Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo. In 2009, the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid organized a retrospective of her work that subsequently traveled to Amsterdam and Bogota.

Her images of ‘File Rooms’ were featured prominently in the exhibition, entitled ‘Illuminazione’ that formed the centerpiece of the Venice Biennale earlier this year.  The celebrated artist has received many awards like the Prince Claus Award by the Netherlands government in 2008 for ‘her image of outstanding quality, providing a well-articulated view of contemporary India, and for introducing a new aesthetic into Indian photography’.

Born in London in 1969, Bharti Kher received a BA in Painting from the Newcastle Polytechnic in Newcastle, UK in 1991. She has been based in New Delhi since 1993. Her recent solos have been hosted at the Parasol unit in London, Hauser & Wirth in New York and Galerie Perrotin in Hong Kong, apart from a series of group exhibitions at prestigious venues like the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the MAXXI Museum in Rome; the John F. Kennedy Center, Washington D.C.; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Mori Art Museum, both in Tokyo, among others.

Through performative modes, artist Sonia Khurana looks to engage with the constant struggle between body and language, to achieve a corporeal eloquence. She tends to draw critically on these concerns in ways that are often visually simple and understated. Using simple forms of social interaction, and proposing the material body as a medium of expression, her art practice delves into states of strangeness, alienation, and alteration, whilst providing with a deliberately tangential discourse of power and powerlessness. 

Last but not the least, Sheba Chhachhi works with lens-based images, both still and moving, to investigate questions of gender, ecology, violence and visual culture. Her works address the question of transformation, personal and collective memory, retrieving the marginal, and the play between the mythic and social.

The artists’ works are on view as part of a show, entitled ‘Seven Contemporaries’ at KNMA, Delhi.