Bhasha Chakrabarti

New Haven, CT

August 1- 31, 2020

ARTIST STATEMENT

Bhasha is currently pursuing her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. As an artist who has been based in New Delhi, Honolulu, New York, and now New Haven, she is interested in exploring how artwork, even when grounded in local materials and symbols, can speak to issues beyond the local by situating her practice within global conversations around race, gender, and power. By crossing many genres, she explores artmaking as a mode of discourse and her work generates dialogues between subaltern tropes and feminine forms of labor from the global South and the agendas of resistance movements of minorities and marginalized communities in the North. 

“I engage with art-making as a process of mending. I choose this metaphor deliberately and often act on it literally. Mending is primarily associated with clothing or articles of personal use, and then extended to relationships. As opposed to other forms of repair, traditionally undertaken by men in a professional capacity, mending is largely non-transactional and often delegated to women. Instead of a mundane and purely utilitarian act, I see mending as a creative gesture that confronts fragility, vulnerability, and impermanence, is reminiscent of the particularities of context, embodies hope and continuity in spite of rifts, and foregrounds the feminine and the intimate. By pulling a thread from this literal form of domestic repair to suture frays in the public domain, my work attempts to rethink societal wounds, darns, and scars as liminal spaces that can transpose us into futures without erasing the past.”

ARTIST LINKS

Website: www.BhashaChakrabarti.com

Instagram: @BhashaAlways