Untangling the childhood memories
Alliance Française de Delhi opened its first series of exhibitions, 'Back From France', under the 'Inview' banner, with a solo exhibition by Aishwarya Sultania.
Titled 'Unwarping Time', the exhibition was inaugurated by Shalini Passi, well-known art collector and founder-director of Shalini Passi Art Foundation and Ashok Vajpeyi, Hindi poet and Managing Trustee of The Raza Foundation, on November 15, 6:30 pm, at Galerie Romain Rolland, Lodi Estate, New Delhi. The exhibition will be on view until November 27.
Curated by Shruthi Isaac, who specialises in the studies of relations between Indian artists and France, the exhibition explores the implications of encounter with an unfamiliar space in the works of Aishwarya Sultania.
In the exhibition of her works, Aishwarya Sultania's conscious steering away from known methods of art making comes evident.
Her works on Ilford paper, 'Empty exposures- from circle to square' (2010), captures two circular entities moving towards each other, their convergence for a brief moment and the swift-moving away of the two bodies, creating two pulsating trail-lines destined to chase each other in an empty rectangular space.
A similar erratic pattern can be felt in an early work 'Excerpts from my painting' (2007), where the artist exposes herself to a clinical test that monitors nerve impulses while her face is being painted. Fluctuating lines across the screen indicative of her response to the touch of a brush are evocative of the lifelines seen in her later etchings.
Speaking on the use of threads in her work, the young artist explained, "The threads keep appearing and disappearing, both spiritually and metaphorically. Even when you do not see them physically in my work, you so see the aspect of connect in most of my works."
"Because it has much to do with my life where the element of connect is very important to me, this element is also there in the stops, metro lines, lines going up and down or just following through," she added.
Talking about Aishwarya Sultania's work, Shruthi Isaac informed that the current collection by the artist untangles her visual memories seeped in childhood impressions of India and tinted with a year-long encounter with Paris.
"A rencounter with an unfamiliar culture and language, the resulting abstractions of word-image and of memory-time inform her art practice. The displayed works are a result of eight years long studio work completed between India and France," added the curator.
Children from Sanskriti School and Shiv Nadar School, Noida will be participating in a workshop held by the artist, Aishwarya Sultania, on November 16.
