| Rites/Rights/Rewrites: Women�s Video Art from India Exhibition curated and presented by: Arshiya Lokhandwala Hartell Gallery at Cornell University. Ithaca, USA 1st to 6th March 2004 Artists Monali Meher Surekha Sonia Khurana Sharmila Samant Darshana Vora Shilpa Gupta Shakuntala Kulkarni The exhibition looks to examine the intervention of video within the practice of contemporary Indian women who use the body as an allegory to locate their concerns and contexts. In this exploration, the exhibition analyses various factors that inform the women�s artistic concerns including globalisation, postcolonial feminist critique and issues of race and gender within the context of India today. Although all works in the exhibition reference the artists using their images and bodies, this exhibition rather than engaging with individual reflection, emphasizes the usage of corporeal bodies as �weapons� embodied as sites of resistance. Rites/Rights/ Rewrites, engages with the exploration of contemporary Indian women in the process of rewriting their own histories; through the breaking of the patriarchal tradition and codes, creating new signs and signifiers in the process. Rites/Rights/ Rewrites presents the work of seven such women artists who employ video as a new language to articulate their resistance, namely Sharmila Samant, Shilpa Gupta, Darshana Vora, Shakuntala Kulkarni, Surekha, Sonia Khurana, and Monali Meher from the megalopolis of Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. Each of the works in the exhibition alludes to the body as a metaphorical site of resistance: the fragmentation of the body in Passing (Sharmila Samant); body as memory in Blue Nostalgia (Monali Meher) ; the mediated body in Untitled (Shilpa Gupta); the persisting body in Bird (Sonia Khurana); the absent body in Mesma Trilogy (Darshana Vora); body as an allegory in Confinement (Shakuntala Kulkarni) and finally the body as a double (Surekha). |
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