South Asian Women Artists' Loop (SAWAL)

SAWAL is a network that will be maintained among a collective of women artists through cyber based exchanges, long distant collaborative art projects and art residencies/workshops that specifically explore the experiences, articulations of women across art disciplines, geographical boarders and cultural specificities.

Room of My Own: Revisited…

Concept of the art project:The A Room of My Own: Revisiting….. ‘ is a project that hopes to explore through different visual art mediums, the creative writings of women who have help to formulate and build South Asia’s feminist discourse grounded on its geo-political and cultural anxieties. These writings have offered an alternative thought process that has help to form informed opinions, practices and ideas towards women in the society through their literary writings. Virginial Wolf, an internationally known female writers whose work has inspired women across continent and cultures is evoked in the title ‘A Room of My Own’ used as a point of departure to engage in literature that is produced within South Asia. The project connects visual art and literature combining the depth of the word and the depth of visuality creating layers of meaning, one that is of the writer and another of the artist. The work process of the artists participating in the project would involve creating artworks with attempts of interpretation, dissection and overlapping of content. This process hopes to produce a series of paintings, drawings, video art, photographs, film, installation and book art through re-reading of local literature.Room of My Own project will have the particiation of of 8 artists representing India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal. The project will run through a period of one year and the works produced during this period will be first shown in selected venues in India. Room of My Own exhibition hopes to travel to Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh in 2011.



Artists from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka are participating in the program 'Room of My Own...'. Seema Kohli/ Brinda Miller (India), Asma Mundrawala / Ayesha Jatoi (Pakistan), Ayesha Sultana/ Tayeba Begum Lipi (Bangladesh), Anoli Perera/ Menika van der Pooten (Sri Lanka) and Ashimina Ranjit/ Sajana Joshi (Nepal) will work together for a period of 12 months (July 2010 -July 2011) on the Room of My Own project creating a large body of artworks responding to selected creative writing pieces by women writers selected from each country. Their work will be done in response to the writings as well as to each others’ work, creating a notion of continuity from one to the other conceptually and visually.

Profiles of Core Group of SAWAL (Coordinators of Room of My Own..).

Seema Kohli (India)

Seema Kohli has exhibited extensively, created installations as Public art for the Ministry of Defense. She has been part of an international traveling exhibition “Ashtanayaka” as a group show with prominent women artists. Seema has been invited to participate in the Florence Biennale (2007, 2009), The Shore Institute of Art New Jersey. She has participated in Art fairs including Arco, Spain (2009), Art Basel, Switzerland (2008, 2009). Her works were auctioned by the Bonham’s Auction House.Seema was awarded the National Lalit Kala Award (2008)..
This text is taken from ArtSlant India (URL: http://www.artslant.com/ind/events/show/82762-mystical-narratives) 
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. 
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: www.seemakohli.com)


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. She, along with Jagath Weerasinghe (the main proponent of 90s Art Trend) and others founded the progressive artists initiative, Theertha International Artists Collective in 2000 that established a forum for promoting contemporary art. In 2007 this was expanded to include Red Dot Gallery, an alternative art space. Anoli Perera has been the general secretary and chief administrator for Theertha since its inception. She has been trained as a stone carver in the USA and has had number of art exhibitions in Sri Lanka as well as internationally. 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 in Sri Lanka.

More information visit: http://www.theertha.org/red-dot-artists/anoli-perera/anoli-perera-1/view


Salima Hashmi  (Pakistan)

Salima Hashmi is the Dean at the School of Visual Arts at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. She taught at the National College of Arts, Lahore, for 30 years. She was also the Principal of the College for 4 years, and held the post of Professor of Fine Arts. She is a painter of repute whose works have been exhibited in Pakistan and in international exhibitions. She has written extensively on the arts, and has curated exhibitions of contemporary art and traditional textile, within Pakistan as well as abroad. Salima Hashmi was the co-founder of the Rohtas Gallery in Islamabad, established in 1981, and established Rohtas-2 in Lahore in 2001. She is a human rights activist and Council Member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

Salima Hashmi also authored a critically lauded book titled 'Unveiling the Visible: Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan' in 2001. In 2006, Salima Hashmi co-authored a book with Indian art historian Yashodhara Dalmia titled 'Memory, Metaphor, Mutations: Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan', published by Oxford University Press. Her latest work, a series of illustrations to accompany English translations of her father's (Faiz Ahmed Faiz) poetry by her husband Shoaib Hashmi.
(Texts from Wikipedia 28 March 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salima_Hashmi & VASL Website, 28 March 2010: http://www.vaslart.org/artists%20pages/Salima/document.2006-06-12.0585387620)

 
Tayeba Begum Lipi (Bangladesh)

Tayeba Begum Lipi was born in 1969 in Gaibanha, Bangledesh. Winner of the Grand Prize at the 11th Asian Arts Biennale in 2004, she has been a major source of energy that supported contemporary art to evolve within the Bangladeshi art scene that has a growing international reputation. Her work stretches across a broad range of media and reflects a desire to engage with as wide an audience as possible.

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.

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.

(Selected texts taken on 28 March 2010 from -http://www.culturebase.net/artist.php?3763)


Sangeeta Thapa (Nepal)

Sangeeta Thapa is a curator, co-founder and co-director of Siddhartha Art Gallery in Kathmandu, and is actively involved since twenty three years in the promotion of contemporary art from Nepal. Thapa curated over 300 shows of various Nepali and international artists at Siddhartha Art Gallery under the motto ‘…committed to investing in creativity and in promoting art that explores new ideas and mediums. She also curated shows for the gallery in other venues in Nepal, ao NAFA Gallery, Art Council, Kathmandu University Department of Fine Art and Design, and abroad. In 2009, she organized the art festival ‘Seperating Myth from Reality: Status of Women’ in Katmandu. Thapa is a fundraiser in the artistic and social field; she works as a consultant for collectors of Nepalese art and interior work for various banks, hotels and private homes. She won awards like the Annapurna Award- Celebrating Womanhood Navadevi Award 2006 (jointly presented by Ministry for Women and Social Welfare and Creative Statements for contribution in the field of arts), and the Best Gallery of the Year Award 2005 (presented by the Artists Society of Nepal). She published two volumes of poetry (Khulla Dhoka, and A Thousand Earths Thousand Skies); and launched BEDAZZLED: a line of creative jewellery inspired by nature. She is an art columnist for VOW magazine and Nukta Art Journal (Pakistan).

(Texts from- www.princeclausfund.org/en/what.../GUESTSandbiographies.)















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