‘I will become a river’ (‘Main Nadi Banungi’)

The Guild is delighted to announce an exhibition of Durgabai Vyam, curated by Nancy Adajania, which recently opened at the gallery. ‘I will become a river’ (‘Main Nadi Banungi’) features works by the artist that revisit various tales of the Narmada from the inherited Pardhan Gond lore. This exhibition frames the artist’s decades-long engagement with the stories she was raised on, relayed through painting, miniature sculpture, video and song.

The curator Nancy Adajania writes: “Durgabai Vyam belongs to the kinship circle of the late iconic artist Jangarh Singh Shyam. Jangarh advised her to shape her own identity (“Apni pehchaan banao”). As a child, her mythopoetic imagination had been nourished by her grandmother Noni Paraste’s stories but there were times when they had to survive on famine food. As a woman, she knew intuitively how to seize every opportunity for self-fashioning. Immensely confident and undeterred by the boys’ club that has dominated the Jangarh kalam, Durgabai has become one of its leading women artists. Her art is not to be isolated within some simple-minded, patronising rubric like ‘folk art’ or ‘tribal art’. Her painterly trajectory and innovations hold their own alongside a spectrum of artistic achievements irrespective of place and period. She is highly inventive and ambitious in amplifying the scope and scale of her language. We should not write off her formal choices and visionary techniques as merely inherited from the Jangarh kalam or reduce them to the artist’s social, cultural and religious background. The Narmada maiya paintings that form the beating heart of ‘Main Nadi Banungi’ are breakthrough artistic productions. They cannot be confined within a simplistic anthropological framework of interpretation.”

The exhibition opened on Monday, 17 August 2025, and is on view every day between 10 am to 6.30 pm until 11 October 2026. The gallery address is 1028, Ranjanpada, Next to Sai Temple, Mandwa Alibaug Road, Alibaug, and can be reached by ferry.

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