Priyanka Aelay, who recently came back from an art residency at Bordeaux, France, organised collectively by the Krishnakriti Art Foundation (Kalakriti Art Gallery) and Bordeaux Metropole talks about her experience and its impact on her art.
“Europe was a completely new experience for me. Bordeaux is an extremely positive place with a historical background and vast breezy landscape. This helped me explore the city and observe its similarities and dissimilarities with our own country. The European artists mostly work in an abstract manner and in minimalistic genre while my artistic oeuvre is very much Indian in its essence and spirit. Each of my works is a juxtaposition of the Indian culture and the stories that I was raised with. My work fascinated the artists and viewers in Bourdeaux, they could connect to my expressions and appreciate them,” says Priyanka.
Priyanka Aelay
The series of works that the young artist worked on during the residency titled, “I wonder how often you dream of me” are presently on display at Kalakriti Art Gallery. The show, titled Vernissage brings forth circular compositions which have been rendered in varied media. There is a ubiquitous amalgamation of flora and fauna in the works which are seamlessly inspired by realistic terrains and fantastical imaginations.
Priyanka Aelay’s artwork from the series Vernissage
With sensitive and delicately fine brush strokes, she weaves an allegory that conceals multiple metaphors. An interlaced connection of one element with the other reveals an intriguing visual experience which seems to be part of a sublime tale. “My works can be read as an affirmation of the self as a repressed rhetoric and as a discursive quip in terms of rethinking the fundamental system of concepts. In this process of assertion, I engrave my “imaginary”/ “imaginative” imageries onto naked surfaces of my free will and choice,” she explains.
During the culmination of the residency, Priyanka says,”My performance was based on the unveiling of the inner and outer self in a public space. The private space became public when during the performance, I draped myself with a saree. The act reinstated the intensity of the effect on a person when judged while depicting the presence of domestic responsibilities in the life of a professionally settled woman. For me, art is a medium to express freedom of thought and the performance only reinforced this belief,” she concludes.
HT02
