Female Artists & The Female Subject

Contemporary female Indian artists are transfiguring the notions behind female identity.

Their art is extremely unique and vary in their meanings but they all seem to render gender theatrically.

The artists, often compelled by the lure and/or revulsion of beauty, play on the charade or mask of gender as an identity through the intersection of many themes.

Nalini Malani utilizes the stereotypes of women during the 19th and 20th centuries in her artwork as she investigates the female subject of the contemporary in relation to the latter. Much of her artwork displays what is termed 'the feminine grotesque" - many of her paintings, films, and installations delve into the repulsive characteristics of the female form, thus contradicting many of the Indian archetypes of women.

Below are a handful of Indian artists who have been recognized internationally for their commentary on femininity....

clicking on their names will take you to an external website featuring their artwork, enjoy.

Taken from Nalini Malani's website -
"Malani's work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India. She places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Hers is an art of excess, going beyond the boundaries of legitimized narrative, exceeding the conventional and initiating dialogue.
Characteristics of her work have been the gradual movement towards new media, international collaboration and expanding dimensions of the pictorial surface into the surrounding space as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, multi projection works and theatre."

Bangalore based Pushpamala N is a Bangalore based photo and video artist. Often she will be the subject in many of her compositions. Her artwork utilizes many historical references in her articulation of gender in relation to today.

Shilpa Gupta is emerging as one of the most important female artists living and working in India today. Considered a pioneer of new media art, she tackles deep-seated issues such as cultural and political divides (or similarities), religion, commerce, and terrorism. She has also created a number of on-line art works. Like many of her generation she views the web as an extension of her daily reality. For her, the net is a habitual part of a conceptual world as television was for an earlier generation

The link on her name take you too a website she created. It is an "online multi-religion blessing station" - you can pick a religion and the website gives you some instructions then blesses you. The website also will provide a certification of the blessing.
The website is an interesting commentary and obvious satire of religious life in India.