dhruvi acharya

ONE LIFE ON EARTH

06 - 30 August 2008

Dhruvi Acharya's 'One Life On Earth', like her previous work, is rooted in personal experience. In the current set of acrylics and watercolours, however, she erases all biographical reference, offering instead a series of meditations on vital political issues of our time: the continuing denial of equality to women; the burgeoning cult of violence across the globe; and the rapid deterioration of the environment.

She eagerly devoured Amar Chitra Kathas as a child, and now returns to them in a critical frame of mind, uncovering the sexism ingrained in these comics and, by extension, in the myths and folk tales they retell. Moving to the sound effects that punctuate her boys' favourite superhero stories, she finds them less like absurd caricatures than gruesome premonitions.

Her own asthma and her father's pulmonary affliction are points of departure for an engagement with environmental crises. In considering the preciousness of clean air, she envisions a world entirely depleted of oxygen. Within this dystopia, some humans adapt by growing botanical extensions which allow them to breathe, while the rest, dependent on the mutants, become buyers, scavengers, hunters and harvesters.

The surfaces of these images are deceptively placid. On closer examination, they reveal a complex, layered and precise application of paint; figuration which synthesises varied influences, from Indian miniatures through cartoons to contemporary advertising; and a carefully ambivalent delineation of victims and oppressors that calls attention to our complicity in the disasters threatening our existence.

Girish Shahane