Shalina Vichitra
Notes
Images
Gallery
Shalina Vichitra's works function as visceral geographical annotations and recordings that employ the tools of geology and cartography to address the complex subject of 'belonging' and the fragile balance between the natural world and human habitation. Space is configured not as a container but is continually 'produced' through human activity, and it cannot be verified, surveyed, mapped, or measured. We're constantly losing and finding our bearings against this gamut, and the physiological, spatial, and temporal 'presents' here coincide with constructing the artist's process of inquiry about a space to which we might belong. Lived spaces communicate our sensorial experience of remembering or imagining a place instead of being within or outside it. Informed by the multifarious relationships that individuals and collectives have with shelters and the environment.
Underlining Vichitra's art practice are moments of movement, of journeying - through paths, routes, across or within boundaries, between past and present, with the suggestion of an alternative possibility. Her work serves as an abstract rendering of a concrete reality that chronicles pieces of land, markings on its surface, its layers, and the patterns in the overall fabric of the Earth, dwellings, and the engagement of man with his immediate environment. The anonymity of its layers, fossilised, not only offers itself as a metaphor for lived experiences but also a tactile archive of the Earth's very being.
KAEE Fellow: Shalina Vichitra
Aspects of geography, landscape, cartography, architecture, and anthropology intertwine her art-making process. Associations, encounters, and experiences with places and people examine socio and geopolitical situations in their present context and concerning their history. Built clusters or barren landscapes, textured surfaces of the Earth or organic settlements, indigenous communities and their practices all become metaphors to decode encounters between the past or the present construct and transcend into a larger, more universal context.
As part of the KKCL research program, Shalina's interest is primarily focused on documenting and archiving the vernacular architecture of Kolkata and how it adopted and maintained a unique amalgamation of characteristics as a byproduct of colonial rule.
Octagonal House