Shalina Vichitra
(b. 1973, Kolkata, India)
My practice functions as visceral geographical annotations and recordings employing the tools of geology and cartography to address the complex subject of ‘belonging’ and the fragile balance between the nature, human habitation and the global order. Underlining my art practice are moments of movement, of journeying - through paths, routes, across or within boundaries, between past and present, with the suggestion of an imagined alternative.
My work chronicles pieces of land, markings on its surface, its layers and the patterns within and boundaries and divides on the overall fabric of the Earth. The anonymity of its layers, fossilised offers itself as a visual metaphor of lived experiences and a tactile archive of the Earth's very being.
Aspects of geography, landscape, architecture and cartography are intertwined with my art making process. Associations, encounters, experiences with places and people examine the dichotomy in anthropological situations in its present context as well as their sociopolitical history. Built clusters or barren landscapes, textured surfaces of the Earth or organic settlements, they all become metaphors to decode encounters between the past and present construct and transcend into a larger more universal context.
My extensive travels to the remote Himalayan highlands has fostered a visual vocabulary of geographies… of the tactile surface of the Earth peppered with archetypical outlines of rocks and fossils and the built structures that inhabit the region. The Earth’s narratives lay preserved, in these topographies, its histories, the memory of what is destroyed, the vestiges of an earlier layer peeping from under, between past and present, standing through the testimony of time.
My recent work attempts to touch upon the very prevalence of communities, their engagement with the land, distorted grids, morphed boundaries of territories and borderlands. Mapping these overlapping instances, converge into the creation of a new form, space and a moment in the collective continuum.
Solo Shows - Art motif, Art Inc and Anant Art. Group Shows- Art Dubai Latitude 28, India Art Fair 2025 Latitude 28, The book project, curated by Shijo Jacob, Apparao Gallery, Kaee Kolkata City lab Curated by Premjish Achari: Kaee Contemporary, Delhi Contemporary Art Week - Bikaner House 2024, India Art Fair 2024, Contours of Contemporary, Quorum 2024 Earth and sea , Contemporary ceramics curated by Kristine Micheal, Indian Ceramics Triennial collateral 2023 : Landscapes And Inscapes Bikaner House presented by Latitude 28, curated by Premjish Achari 2023 Unearthing Memories of Civilisation’ Kiran Nadar Museum of Art 2020 : Art Mumbai, 2023 : Delhi Contemporary Art Week - Bikaner House 2023 Art Dubai 2023 - Latitude 28 : Spatial- gallery Art Motif 2023, “Inner life of Things” of Anatomies and Armature - Curated by Roobina Karode Kiran Nadar Museum of Art 2022, India Art Fair 2016-2025 : ‘Playhouse of Her Mind’, Latitude 28, 2021: Brink Art Centrix 2021 : ’When is Empathy too much’, Latitude 28, 2020 : Infinite Continuum - IHC Art Incept : Poetics of Space - Art Positive: ‘Grain’- Gallery Espace : ‘Negotiating Matters’ Anant Art curated by Roobina Karode : Summer Show’, Nature Morte : Contemporary Indian Art- Visual Arts Gallery gallery Art Motif : ‘Emerging India’ -Royal College London : ‘Who do you think I am’- The Gallery at Cork Street London: ’Contemporary Indian art’, Mueller and Plate, Munich : Fusing Barn Biennale, Taiwan 2008. Solo Onsite Project “A thousand white Flags” supported by The India Art Fair, New Delhi 2019 The project reiterates the very ethos of peacemaking, and the act leads to making connections and building involvement with the Himalayan Community. Currently the project is in the permanent collection of KNMA and was part of a show the show ‘Inner life of Things- Around Anatomies and Armatures” April ’22 at the museum, curated by Roobina Karode. Fellow Resident-research led residency programme by KAEE Kolkata City Lab and Art Ichol. The scope of my research is to examine the shift in the characteristics of Kolkata city through its built environment, its engagement with the community and the cultural and political memory that’s embedded in its lived spaces. Kolkata’s neighbourhoods are an outcome of community engagement and can be understood in terms of its unique socio-political arrangement.