Stri Avalekha

Priyanka Tagore

2015 has already been a year of many changes. An inexperienced party swept up the nation by storm with the best polling rate in the history of Indian politics. India opened the ICC Cricket World Cup as defending champions. One of the more important changes in my personal life happened to be in my perspective towards art. When I fi rst joined Swaraj Art Archive my knowledge-base about art was very limited, to the extent that I believed Jamini Roy to be a woman. Having been introduced to a legion of names, the initial days were spent splashing around in uncharted waters, documenting a
stack of works I’d never seen before. Forms, lines and colours were some of the things that had gone unnoticed up until then. Listening to known stories behind what made an artist an ‘artist’ and digging up information about the unknown ones made the journey interesting. When the Swaraj team sat down late last year to plan our annual show, we didn’t have a concrete idea in mind.

On a regularday at the building, during the customary archiving procedure, it dawned on us that we were surrounded by women – cheerful women, bereaved women – some posing, some gazing at us, and others oblivious to our presence. This revelation led to the conceptualization of Stri Avalekha. After combing through the entire collection over and over again, three hundred and seventy eight works were brought out – some of which had never seen the light of day – and gridded together into large bodies of works, weaving a visual comparison of the iconography associated with each of them. With worksby over a hundred artists, from local artisans to the masters of the field, the exhibition is divided into five sub-categories, tapping major hallmarks of the Indian tradition of art, representing the woman as the expression of an emotion – namely pride, harmony, love, acquiescence, and devotion.