Shalini Bisawajit’s portray
| Photograph Credit score: Particular Association
The gallery at Chennai’s Lalit Kala Akademi hums like an unruly classroom at 11am. Voices overlapping, footsteps echoing, directions slicing by means of the air. The atmosphere feels apt because the area is at present internet hosting The Artwork of Turning into: Stella(r) Alumni Canvas, a coming-together of 20 artists formed by the Division of Wonderful Arts at Stella Maris School.
Some are including closing touches to their installations, ensuring the sculptures are sitting proper, writing notes and directions on methods to view the works finest. On the centre of all of it is curator Ashrafi S Bhagat, as soon as their professor, now an artwork historian and critic, shifting from work to work with a measured eye. The classroom could also be a long time behind them, however the self-discipline stays.
“I conceived this exhibition round two interconnected concepts — the mystique of the ocean and the fragility of time and area,” says Ashrafi. “Each are highly effective, enigmatic, and ever-changing. Nothing stands nonetheless. Should you take a look at fragility of time and area, for me it’s reminiscence; time plus the area it occupies in your thoughts. And that very same fragility exists within the ocean’s ecosphere. It’s weathered, altered, generally consciously degraded. Each are facets of life which are consistently in flux.”
The end result just isn’t thematic uniformity, however divergence inside a shared framework. Some artists have immersed themselves in each ideas; others have anchored themselves firmly in a single.
For Thejomaye Menon, additionally one of many organisers of the exhibition, the ocean turns into vitality in movement. Lengthy related to a personalised figurative language, she has consciously stepped into abstraction to discover drive reasonably than type. On this collection, currents surge throughout the canvas in layered chromatic fields, round actions echoing each tidal rhythm and planetary orbit. “I’ve labored on the depth beneath the ocean and linked it to the universe. Once we communicate of the fragility of time, I really feel it’s decided by planetary change. The planets affect motion. We could not totally perceive it, however time shifts with these forces. It’s a thriller,” she says.
“Every of those work took about three months,” says Preetha Kannan, standing earlier than a canvas layered in dots of blues and greens. To grasp the intricate particulars in every portray, she presents the viewer with a magnifying glass. Having stepped away from portray to pursue volunteer work in Chennai and later with Baba Amte in rural India for environmental and social causes, Preetha returned to artwork with sharpened environmental urgency.
In her work, she depicts scenes beneath the floor of the ocean. Metallic, plastic, bullets and different particles gathers whereas marine life seems to adapt round what humanity leaves behind. The ocean, right here, just isn’t mystic spectacle. It’s an archive holding proof of warfare, waste and survival.
Shalini Biswajit then again, approaches the fragility of time as a religious urgency. Drawing from years of learning scripture, significantly Vedantic thought, her work centres on what she calls “inside leisure”, which is a state of stillness that withstands the inevitable highs and lows of life. On canvas, that seems as measured squares in muted ochres and blues. Put in alongside are metallic figures of a person and a girl on two sides of the identical metallic sculpture. “Within the time span we’re given, we should prioritise the very purpose we now have this human delivery. You don’t know what’s going to occur tomorrow. There may be an urgency in recognising that,” she says.
For Ashrafi, the exhibition is much less about nostalgia and extra about continuity. The artists could differ in language and medium, however the mental rigour stays seen. “I don’t permit homogeneity,” she says with a smile. “I needed individuality. The kinds, the methods, the expressions should replicate their very own sensibility.”
The Artwork of Turning into: Stella(r) Alumni Canvas is on from February 11 to 16, 11am to 7pm at Lalit Kala Academi
Revealed – February 11, 2026 04:10 pm IST
