on India and its
Diaspora’s Heritage
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WORK by RAKHI PESWANI
Rakhi’s artistic practice dwells on the visceral as much as it does in its making by hand. Her works foreground the corporeality and fluids of the woman’s body and the violence subjected on it. Using simple lines and colour stains, she evokes as well as critiques the abjection of female subjectivities.
Her series of drawings, 'Inflections (Reflections on Land)', incorporates the liquidity of natural pigments that are both reflective of bodily fluidity and ecologically sensitive dyeing traditions.
Her limited palette of earthy colours invoke the flesh of the body. The artworks act like primal stains encompassing the primordial qualities of both woman and earth.
She frames the sensations and social processes that the female body endures under the oppressive expectations laid on women to act in certain ways both in private and in public. She has created a stark new visual language to portray women and, to invoke Gilles Deleuze concept, ‘a body without organs’
It is often the case that mainstream heritage discourse is santised and lacks the ability to account for the viscerality of bodies and violence against women that lies invisible at the core of its making. Women are the often unwritten heritage hero(ine)s. Rakhi’s drawings and paintings render visible the stains that lie in the ancestral debts to female labour, creativity, endurance, trauma and tactility that go into the making and (re)shaping of heritage.