Working with solitude

The idea of solitude can be quite overwhelming for many, but for artist Naini Arora, it was what inspired her to come up with her art work that she recently installed at the castle-turned-museum Agathenburg in Germany.

As Naini spoke to the audience of the Kunst Forum at Goethe Zentrum in Hyderabad on Saturday, she brought her art work alive through her words.

Back in September, curator Anja Ellenberger was in the city for a show and it was then she met Naini. “She had asked me to be part of a show, but only earlier this year did I start working on it,” explains Naini, who worked on three installations that consisted of a sound installation, works with wood cuts and an art installation.

Her works, titled, Re-memberance dealt with solitude and how old people deal with it. “When I thought of the idea, I had a lot of personal conversations with myself about how my grandmother, a widow for 20 years, lived without her partner. Then Anja told me about the story of the castle owner. She said the owner was an old widow who used it as her holiday-home before converting it to a museum. That got me thinking and added to the work. I play on the idea of ‘hidden and reveal’ for this work, working around the most intimate actions of women, like plaiting one’s hair,” she says.

For the sound installation, Naini collaborated with T.K. Saroja, a Carnatic singer from Hyderabad, and also has beats from the tabla, and the sound of a heartbeat.