Creating Through Crisis: Women Artists and Conflict Zones

Ita Mehrotra is a visual artist, researcher and educator based out of New Delhi. Her non-fiction graphic narratives and illustrated text stem from first-hand work within social movements, and in unravelling their particular histories, while continuously interrogating modes of visual representation and evidence-making. Her work has been published and exhibited by Goethe Institute, Fumetto Festival (Luzern), thewire, Zubaan Books, Yoda Press, AdAstra Comix (Canada), popula.com, and KHOJ Artists Association, among others. Ita’s graphic book Shaheen Bagh, A Graphic Recollection (Yoda Press, 2021) voices moments and memories from the vast anti-CAA uprising across India over the winter of 2019. Ita leads arts projects with grassroot organisations and community schools across India and led Artreach India between 2017 to 2024. She is Visiting Faculty at Ashoka University, teaching a course in graphic non-fiction drawing. Ita is a recipient of the Arts for Good Fellowship (Singapore International Foundation), Fumetto Apprenticeship Grant (Swiss Arts Council), Gender-Bender Arts Grant (Sandbox Collect & Goethe Institute), Young Connectors of the Future Fellowship (Swedish Institute), Negotiating Routes Art & Ecology Grant (KHOJ Artists Association), the KhelMel Artists Grant (Artreach India) and the SciencesPo Exchange Programme (SciencesPo Paris & Delhi University), among others.

Mumbai based artist Shilpa Gupta’s artworks probe how people and their experiences are formed by places, objects and via processes of classification, limitation, and censorship. Her work has been shown at biennales including Venice, Gwanju, Sharjah, Kochi, Berlin and her works are in the collection of Guggenheim Museum, Centre Pompidou, Tate, Kiran Nadar Museum amongst others.

Nancy Adajania is a Bombay-based cultural theorist and curator. She was Joint Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2012). She has curated a number of exhibitions including, ‘One Hundred Years And Counting: Rescripting K G Subramanyan’ (Emami with Seagull, 2024) and ‘Woman Is As Woman Does’ (CSMVS Museum with JNAF, 2022), a first-ever intergenerational mapping of the works of Indian women artists, filmmakers and activists against the backdrop of the women's movement in India. Adajania's other major research-based exhibitions include the retrospectives of artists Navjot Altaf, Sudhir Patwardhan, Mehlli Gobhai and Nelly Sethna. She has proposed several new theoretical models through her extensive writings on subaltern art, media art, public art, collaborative art, transcultural art and the biennale culture in the Global South. Her writing on the practices of women artists across several generations deploys a trans-disciplinary approach, melding art history, feminist theory, anthropology, activism and philosophy.

Navjot Altaf is a transcultural artist, whose inventive multi-media work reflects political and aesthetic concerns that have been informed by dialogical ways of working. Her practice is located in the metaphor of flow – across materiality and theory, across place and people, and in finding a transdisciplinary perspective where inquiry and self-inquiry intersect. She has also been engaged with Indigenous artists and the communities in Chhattisgarh since 1997 and is one of the founder members of DIAA - ‘Dialogue - interactive Artists Association’ in Kondagaon, Chhattisgarh and has organized Seminars, Samvad 1’ 2007, Samvad 2’ 2011, Samvad 3’ 2015, and Samvad 4’ 2019, Samvad 5’ 2023. Her Selected solo exhibitions and participations in and outside India include- ‘Navjot Altaf: Pattern’, solo, Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2022) ‘Samakalik: Earth Democracy and Women Liberation’, solo, PAV Parco Arte Vivente,Turin, Italy (2019) ‘Open Borders’ Curitiba Biennial, Brazil (2019) ‘The earth’s Heart Torn Out’ Navjot Altaf: A life in Art, A retrospective, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, India (2018-19), ‘From the Desert-Ecologies on the Edge’, Yinchuan Biennale, China (2018) ‘Stretched Terrains - Interpositions: Replaying the Inventory’, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art New Delhi, India (2017) ‘Why Not Ask Again’, 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016)