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Richa Arya

India

My works are an embodiment of the feminist spirit of ‘personal is political’, and self-reliance of fighting for oneself. In my accessible visual language, I seek to articulate the sheer immensity of patriarchal oppression which otherwise remains unaccounted for. By juxtaposing starkly contrasting mediums as against the delicate femininity of the subject matter, I attempt at situating the audience into similar spaces of gender ambivalence and inequality as characteristic of women's experiences across all age groups. At another level, the process of my work- stitching through strong, difficult mediums of iron and metal sheets, in itself becomes a site of resistance against patriarchal policing; of channelings deep anguish, ultimately transforming my art pieces into agents of women empowerment. Iron, in their intrinsic ubiquity in households, and their strength and resilience become parallel to lived experiences of women in my work, while their ‘stitching’, ‘folding’ and ‘cutting’ is an added feminization; synonymous to idioms within the complex institutional economies of womanhood in South Asia. Through my practice I am directly engaging in a critique of the patriarchal apparatus as a whole which manifests materially as linguistic, educational and class deterrent for women and other marginally positioned social groups.

Artworks