Lavanya Mani

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Born in 1977, Lavanya Mani started Ph.D in 2001 from the Dept. of Art History & Aesthetics M.S.U. Baroda, under Dr. Shivaji Pannikar. She pursued MFA in Painting (1999-2001) and B FA in Painting (1995-1999), from The Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S.U Baroda. Lavanya Mani has participated in Group Shows in Paris, Hyderabad and Baroda. In 2006 she was recipient of KAVA (Kashi Award for Visual Art) Kashi Art Galley, Kochi and in 2001 the Nasreen Mohammedi, Award for Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts MSU Baroda. Her recent group participations are:  in 2009, Analytical engine at Gallery Seven, Delhi, in 2008: Through a Glass, Darkly at the Guild, Mumbai and Interlude: Venice/Kassel at N.C.P.A by The Guild, Mumbai.

Lavanya Mani is one of the new age women artists in India, who skillfully negotiates the postmodern dilemmas in her works. Addressing a much debated colonial history from an elevated field of multi-cultural give and takes, Lavanya Mani finds her language from history, book illustrations and pictorial renditions of the moral stories. Over the last few years, Lavanya has been working with various techniques associated with textiles such as embroidery, tie and dye, appliqué, batik etc in conjunction with painting. She talks about her works saying that, “Cloth has been at the center of a long set of historical associations between femininity, decorativeness and deception. These have to do, on the one hand, with the way various art / craft practices such as embroidery, knitting, needlework etc, were seen primarily as “women’s work”, as well as to the perceived sinfulness/ excess of the decorative, within a patriarchal economy, that privileged austerity and functionality. This could also be related to what was considered to be the inherent deceptiveness of cloth- as its ability to hide as well as reveal, and its ability to change the persona of the wearer; tales and fables, that have been associated with it, emphasize dyeing and changing colors as a narrative device.” – Lavanya Mani.

“Anyone who comes across the works of Lavanya Mani can comfort himself with a partial stake over the images that populate her works. They belong to the family of Imperial imagination, with visions, which wonder, amuse and haunt the subjects of the Empire. We all know a little about our colonial past, and we all have gone through the same feelings of amusement and disbelief leafing through the pages of occidental accounts of oriental histories. The narrations perhaps have the most appeal when we stumble upon words and images that displace our image of ourselves. They create that uneasy euphoria which we reserve for the ignorant master whose knowledge of our world is always abstract and far from reality. Lavanya’s works deal with such images of abstraction. They make room into the crowded Colonial Archive, pry open its doors and invite us to have a walk around. Lavanya does not aim to see her work as the logical conclusion of a historical process. Her attitude to the history of representation is at best navigational, and her artistic process is closer to commentary than interpretation. Her images rather precede her chosen genealogy, reversing the route of disseminations, and as a result she helps us see the past without suspending us from the present. It is this projective quality that makes her work so interesting; they work as independent supplements to the already existing archive of the Empire.” – Parvez Kabir.