Home is wherever you are

Home is wherever you are marks Rekha Rodwittiya’s 20th solo with Sakshi Gallery. Spread across two floors and spanning oil on canvas, embroidery, carpets, photography, and watercolours, the exhibition brings together a wide-ranging body of work that reflects the artist’s sustained engagement with memory, lived experience, history and the narratives of women. Also presented for the first time is a series of photographs taken by Rodwittiya in 1978, while studying under the tutelage of Professor Jyoti Bhatt. Rodwittiya’s densely layered compositions often create spaces in which personal and collective histories intersect. As the artist observes, “My area of focus resembles a garden—a tiny plot of land that I continually cultivate, till, plow, and harvest.” This process of accumulation and reconfiguration is evident in the ongoing series Home is wherever you are. Here, photographs taken by the artist are meticulously arranged into densely configured tableaux before being over-painted in watercolour. The painted surface simultaneously reveals, alters and obscures the photographic image beneath it. Through this process of layering, rearticulation and erasure, the works consider the ways in which histories are constructed, altered and selectively remembered. A sustained engagement with the lives and narratives of women has remained central to Rodwittiya’s practice. Her work considers the individual within larger structures of geography, politics, gender and social hierarchy, while foregrounding the complexity of lived experience. As she writes, “The politics of a region, the geography of a space, and the hierarchies of existence that give rise to oppressions and suppression, all in relation to how women are positioned within these contexts, serve as the trigger for me to discover meaningful content and purpose within my work.”