Artist Tulika Ladsariya’s work explores people at work, and issues of language
Tulika's paintings from the Work in Progress series
Artist Tulika Ladsariya started her career as a Chartered Accountant for a multi-national bank. However, she soon realised that her interest lied with art. After a educational stint, what she calls, “to experience life as an artist” she even worked for an auction house in Mumbai in 2007. “It was then that I realised that there is no balance and I have to jump headlong and just commit,” she observes. And thus started her journey as an artist. The Chicago-based artist will be presenting a collection of paintings and sculptures in an exhibition titled Work in Progress at the Jamaat Gallery in Colaba, Mumbai, till October 8.
Tulika’s current work explores labour and issues of language and literacy in our society today. She reveals that moving away from Mumbai, even if for a brief time, helped her look at issues with a different perspective. She says, “Labour in all developing nations has been the job of the poor: Where you use your body, rather than your mind, to earn. Moving away from Mumbai allowed me to visualise the city and its people more objectively.
The workers are the unseen part of this landscape-building, restoring, without access to the inside, perched on the threshold. Their precarious stance and lack of harness speaks volumes of the lack of value of human life in India. I just wanted to bring them, their life condition and their struggle of migration to the forefront through this series.” Her painting, Bookwallah, draws attention on the bookseller who sells books but cannot read. She says, “The irony of the image is something I see as particularly poignant. They form the metaphors and visual puns of the dichotomy of India. Also sometimes, we realise how little of our lives we actually control we all can choose who we want to be in a given set of circumstances, but very rarely can we actually choose those circumstances. This is something that just binds us together as human beings.”
The artist reveals that while being an artist demands a lot of your time, she isn’t complaining. When she isn’t working, Tulika finds happiness in museums, galleries and art fairs, cooking and yoga. The artist, who is also an art editor for a publication, states, “I try to keep my working hours in the studio constant and schedule everything else around it.”
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