About the Event
Artist Saviya Lopes speaks to and from the women of her family, her grandmother, her mother and through them all the others, in an intergenerational dialogue that holds questions of womanhood, tradition, caregiving, resistance, labour and feminism.
Join us for a panel discussion with Saviya Lopes, Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar and Jyoti Nisha, moderated by Priyanka Paul as we delve into our personal histories and legacies that have made us who we are today, and how these passed down legacies from the women who have come before us inform our everyday life and art practices.
About the Panelists
Priyanka Paul aka Artwhoring is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer from Mumbai, India. Their work revolves around the themes of social justice, marginalisation and self exploration and has been published and exhibited globally. Paul’s work uses bright and pastel colours interspersed with humour to talk about themes ranging from gender and caste to analysing current media trends and contemporary society.
Saviya Lopes is a visual artist, based in Vasai (Bassein), India. She graduated from Rachna Sansad AFAC, Mumbai and has participated in various group exhibitions in India and across the globe since 2015. She was a participating artist and later the Director at Clark House Initiative, Mumbai. Coming from the community of East Indian Catholics, she often works with her native history, through family archives and oral narratives; drawing upon activities like quilt making by her grandmother as manifestations of dissent. Her work deftly unpicks; reimagines history and reconsiders it for future generations. It never wavers in choosing a visual language to reinterpret what is lost. Her works really speak on a feminist key, intersectional, where subtlety, transparence, delicacy convey stories of violence, of heritage, colonialism. And so much more that there is to think from them.She is passionate about the role of women in relationship to labour and textile histories. Lopes’s artistic practice draws from experiences in the spaces she inhabits. She looks at the body as an active agent of societal protest and symbolic value. Her work shows interest in the inter- relation between body, language, culture and navigation of spaces.
Mumbai-based Jyoti Nisha is a multidisciplinary professional- an academic, writer, screenwriter and filmmaker with a focus on cinema, gaze, caste, gender and media, and has 13 years of experience in print, radio and T.V. Her article ‘Indian Cinema and the Bahujan Spectatorship' in the Economic and Political Weekly is credited with conceptualizing a theory that opposes the popular culture’s casteist male gaze and stereotypical representation of the marginalized, earlier called as untouchables, on the silver screen. Bahujan Spectatorship explores the consumption and experience of spectatorship of popular cinema’s representation of caste, gender, and sexuality by the marginalized Bahujans of India. She also worked as a director’s assistant to Neeraj Ghaywan for his short Geeli Pucchi (that explores gaze, caste, gender, and patriarchy), a part of Netflix’s Ajeeb Daastans anthology. Nisha directed, produced and crowdfunded her upcoming feature-length documentary film, Dr. Ambedkar: Now and Then in collaboration with Pa Ranjith’s Neelam Productions, which is soon to release. She also worked as a Producing faculty at Whistling Woods International, Mumbai. Jyoti has written for AlJazeera, Economic and Political Weekly, The Verve Magazine, The Routledge, The Times of India, The Indian Express and NDTV.
Shrujana N Shridhar is an illustrator and artist based in Mumbai. She works on children’s books and editorial illustrations. Her work centres anti-caste expression from an Ambedkarite and feminist perspective. She belongs to the Ambedkarite-Buddhist community, and runs the Dalit Panther Archive, which focuses on digitising and translating Little Magazines and literature published by the members of the Dalit Panther movement.
