Seema Kohli (India)
Seema Kohli's works reveal a claiming of feminine subjectivities, an altered concept of feminine sexuality. Her works bring into focus a woman's physical attributes, her intellect, thought, dreams and realities. There is a celebration of beauty, sensuality and intimacy in her art. Seema's most recent thematic engagement has been that of the 'Hiranyagarbha', that evolved from a mantra of the Yajur Veda, reflecting the quiet and subtle beauty of constant procreation. All the works are a prayer to the eternal self - a way of meditation. These works are spiritual but not religious, exploring with them, a poetically elegant and richly sensuous female form. The 'Golden Womb' is a celebration through which the supremacy of a female is established and how she procreates and keeps the journey of life, forever on. Her work is symbolic of the progress and recycling of thought processes in the human mind, which is portrayed as calmer, more mature and serene both in terms of the palette and the form. All her works are a gesture of the divine, a prayer to the eternal self, a way of meditation.Her work validates in different mediums in the past eighteen years, some constant, being the search for the self, while other being an extension of her conceptual and creative growth as an artist and she works in both small and large formats with layers of drawings and colors. Seema has recently been facilitated by Lalit Kala Akademi for being an achiever as a woman in Contemporary Indian Art. She lives and works from her studio in Delhi.
(Texts taken on 28 March 2010 from -http://www.saffronart.com/artist/artistprofile.aspx?artistid=1266.
More information visit: http://www.seemakohli.com/)
Brinda Miller (India)
School of Arts, Mumbai and Parsons School of Design, New York. Brinda has been recipient of several awards since childhood. She stood 1st in Maharashtra in 1979, when passing out of Sir JJ School of Arts; and her most recent awards are The Rotary Club of Sealand's' Vocational Excellence and Appreciation 'Award 2008-9 ;and Women Achievers Award, Giants International,2009
As a multi-media artist, Brinda has taken part in several International workshops and art camps. Brinda has also been festival curator of The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2007, 2008, 2009 . As Kala Ghoda Executive Committee member, she also looks into the upkeep and restoration of this art district. The artist has been instrumental in creating murals for Mumbai , and believes in bringing public art to beautify the city. Her future projects include displaying Indian contemporary art at the newly renovated International Airport, Mumbai
More information available on following website: http://www.brindamiller.comMenika van der Pooten (Sri Lanka)
Menika van der Poorten has been involved in the field of photography for over 20 years as a photographer, picture researcher, teacher, arts administrator and editor both in Sri Lanka and in England. Her photographic education was received at the John Cass School, London and University of Westminster, UK. She has been engaged in freelance teaching at the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts, Overseas School of Colombo, and the Colombo Academy of Design. Van der Pooten’s work investigates intimate experiences and interrogation of self and gender tensions through reworking of topographical elements from one’s own personal histories. She looks at her own family history and reconstructs a memory book as a psychological play with a sense of nostalgia.
Van der Poorten works in black and white and color films. She has also worked with sun prints that are not lens based and has an element of unknown. At present, van der Poorten lives and works in Sri Lanka, and can be identified as one of the very few photographers who engages in art photography.
More information available on following website:
http://www.theertha.org/red-dot-artists/menika-van-der-pooten
Above Top: Granny's Chest. Above bottom: Last Doll Series
Anoli Perera (Sri Lanka)
Anoli Perea was born in Colombo. A self taught artist, she is currently based in Colombo and works as a full time professional artist. She has been part of the wave of artists in the 1990s who have professed a new ideological position in the art production in relation to the contemporary art knowledge and social context in Sri Lanka. The interventionist nature of Perera's artistic personality first came into focus in her late 1990's series of paintings titled 'Aditi'. Since then, she has deployed her creative-critical energy to investigate issues pertaining to the roles expected to be played by women in a society that is neither modern nor traditional, but largely para-modern. Her works present us with two distinct lines of inquiry into the 'being of woman'. On the one hand, she has been questioning the position of woman as a social being, within which she is expected to wear the burdensome marks (signs /traits) of a culture depriving them of their sense of agency as individuals. On the other hand, she has been looking into the role of women as 'mother' or 'bride', or as the person who faces the brunt of the tension of conflicts inside the 'home-family' domain. Her past works such as 'Dinner for Six' (which is also exhibited in the current show) and 'I am the Queen' have been mostly directed towards investigating the intriguing and coercive roles imposed upon women by the cultural discourse of family. In her recent works, the sculptures titled 'Silent Grievers' and the series of paintings named 'Comfort Bodies' she has reinvestigated with a certain sense of poignancy, the life of women caught in the discourse of family. Anoli Perera is at her best when she engages in making labor-intensive art works, an exercise in which she locates herself in the intermediate zone between craft and art. Perera constructs her work by weaving, by placing or by suturing a single unit, piece by piece together as if she were solving or making a puzzle carefully. At the end of this process of solving/making a puzzle, she leaves a sense of tentativeness on the works in terms of the possible visual pleasures that the work can offer to its observers (Jagath Weerasinghe 2007).
Her art practice of over 15 years includes painting, sculpture, installation, and object art. Her work helped to initiate a tendency in art that is informed of feminist criticality.
Source: Jagath Weerasinghe, exhibition catalog ' Comfort Zones', Pitakotte: Red Dot Gallery/Theertha, 2007
More information visit: http://www.theertha.org/red-dot-artists/anoli-perera/anoli-perera-1/view
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Above left: Measured, Stitched and Stretched Series (2009). Right: Elastic Dress (2009).
Ayesha Jatoi (Pakistan)
Ayesha Jatoi has a background in Miniature Painting and went on to do a Masters in Visual Arts at the National College of Art in Lahore. She has been dealing dealt with a varied range of socio-political concerns in her work.
Her practice has begun also to comment on art making itself and often questions the relevance of traditional modes of working today. Her fascination with the illuminated manuscripts in which miniatures paintings appeared is obvious through her use of image, text and diptych format found in her work. Text has started to play a very dominant role in her work of late and frees itself from its conjugal image ever so often.
More information available on following websites:
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Above top: Taliban-flogging-2009. Above bottom: clothesline-(on-fightjet) - 2006
Asma Mundrawala (Pakistan)
Asma Mundrawala received her BFA degree from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture Karachi in 1995 and an MA in Contemporary Art and Performance Theory from the Wimbledon School of Art, UK in 2002.
Her recent exhibitions include Monitor 6, New South Asian Film and Video screenings at SAVAC in Toronto, Resemble Reassemble from the Devi Art Foundation Delhi, Hanging Fire, Contemporary Art From Pakistan Asia Society, New York, The Purple Wall Project for Project 88 at the India Art Summit New Delhi and a series of screenings for the Moti Roti Project, 60x60 secs in the UK, India and Pakistan. She has also attended artists’ workshops and residencies, which include Vasl International Artists Residency Lahore (2006), Darmiyaan, Neher Ghar Gallery Lahore (2003), Theertha Artists’ Residency, Lunuganga Sri Lanka (2003), Triangle Studios Artist in Residence – Educational Outreach Programme, Gasworks Studios London (2002).
She has also been a performer with the Karachi based theatre group Tehrik e Niswan (The Women’s Movement) since 1997, where she has worked as an actor and designer in both urban and community theatre productions, and has directed her first theatre play for Tehrik e Niswan in 2008. Asma has performed in Pakistan and internationally in theatre festivals, and worked with directors from Pakistan as well as from Bangladesh, India, Germany and UK. Asma’s is based in Karachi and is currently a D.Phil candidate at the University of Sussex (UK)
Above: Overture. Right: Is-You-Is-or-Is-You-Ain't.
Ayesha Sultana (Bangladesh)
More information available on following websites: http://www.vaslart.org/
Tayeba Begum Lipi (Bangladesh)
Primarily working with paint, print and installation, Lipi’s art often involves portraiture and feminine iconography (such as mannequins and dolls) to explore themes around the nature of female identity. Her piece, ‘My Childhood’ (2003; winner of the AAB prize) playfully demonstrates many of her ideas: a large, painted self-portrait is veiled behind a series of neatly ordered dolls; the smiling, white skinned dolls serve to contrast with the enigmatic expression of her own image and raise questions about childhood role models, femininity and race. Lipi has also sought to encourage social engagement with art, promoting workshops where both the public and other artists can interact with one another. The strongest realisation of her commitment to this is shown by her involvement with (and continued coordination of) the Britto Arts Trust, a Dhaka based, non-profit, initiative that she co-founded (along with her husband and several other artists) in 2002. Set up to encourage the Dhaka art scene, Britto is also part of the international Triangle Arts Trust workshop and residency network, and as such helps to foster international relationships and cross-cultural dialogue between artistic communities.
(Text taken on 28 March 2010 from -http://www.culturebase.net/artist.php?3763)
Ashmina Ranjit (Nepal)
Ranjit’s works are designed to increase awareness of crucial on going social and political issues of marginalized communities. She works with groups of women, children and artists using a wide range of media: drawing, painting, video, sound, installation, and performance. Ranjit explores female identity in her artwork, raising questions about women’s cultural roles, social gendering, physical experiences, and sexuality in her paintings, prints, installations, performances, sounds and videos. In her provocative works, she reclaims women’s experiences and gives voices to their political concerns as well as to their most intimate expressions of desire, joy and fulfillment. Ranjit works also focus on social injustice, human rights violations and the on going violence - war in her country and around the world.
Ranjit has traveled and exhibited widely in Asia, Europe, Australia, and the USA including Dhaka Biennale and Fukuoka Triennale. Her installations, performances, films have been included in solo and group exhibitions around the world. She has participated in several artists residencies in Asia and Europe. She has organized and coordinated national and international residencies in her home country. Ranjit has won several awards Scholarships and fellowships such as a Fulbright (USA), Aus-aid (Australia), Honorable Mentioned- Dhaka Biennele. Ranjit had taught at Tribhuwan University, Nepal and has lectured at including Fahan School, Tasmania, Australia, Funen Art Academy, Odense, Denmark and Cornell Nepal study program in Kathmandu. Ranjit, currently resides in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Sajana Joshi (Nepal)
The translation of outer layer and material of familiar items into strange creatures using natural mediums such as animal skin could be an irony on the human need and their attitude towards animal.
My works are associated with covering, hiding, layering, dressing, and peeling. The skin of animal serves to infuse a sense of life in the objects which are normally built with hard materials such as wood, steel and plastic. The skin not only builds a relationship between organic and constructed materials but also generates a sad, neglected and vulnerable scenario of the subject matter. 
