Rakhi Peswani

Born on 14 October 1977, Rakhi Peswani has a Bachelor's degree in painting and a Master's in sculpture from M.S University of Baroda. She has participated in numerous group shows and solo shows and was also the recipient of the Emerging Artist Award, 2007, presented by Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi.

She is inspired by the chaotic maturity of Indian cities into metropolitans as they provide an abundant engagement with the visual. Simultaneously, an exponential growth of technological innovations in the city allows this mere engagement to take the role of communication possibilities, which make the viewer meander between being a passive consumer and an active producer of visual idioms.

According to her our times allow more and more creation, production and consumption of vast quantities of visual data, it is also producing a mindless disenchantment with the process of creation and consumption of this data. The expanse between what we see and what we touch and respond to has only increased with the passage of modernity. The unified body has been fragmented into inert zones of perception. This experience of fragmentation has structured her focus to the processes of traditional crafts; allowing her to re-route the notion of oneself through the language of these processes. While the craft practice (and its system of knowledge) becomes one of the categorical choices in contemporary possibilities, it is able to align the discrete functions of her body towards a coherent understanding of current realities.

Her point of departure is to locate a visual / verbal / tangible language that blends the local character of our system and the global character of verbal language. The possible dual responsibility of a language allows her to articulate some of the present identities of an artist working within contemporary realities. She further layers this juxtaposition with the inclusion of verbal text, fabricating discreet ironies within the material processes to depict contemporary identities.

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