Rithika Pandey (b. 1998, Varanasi) lives and works in Mumbai, India. She has grown up in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. Pandey graduated with a BA (Hons) in fine Art from Carmarthen School of Art, Wales, UK (2020) following her studies in Contemporary Art Practice at Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology, Bangalore, India.

Pandey’s roots place her in Varanasi — an ancient site of funeral rites and sacred waters. Her protagonists enter onto this stage. Painting is used to create a theatrical space where more-than-human entities enact complex, dynamic rituals in the chasm between life and death. Amongst these entities are Pandey’s Bloomdidos — nomadic, dark-skinned figures, fashioned after the fierce emancipatory goddesses, Kali and Dakini. The Bloomdidos converse non-verbally with other entities on their stage in the interest of compassionate inquiry. An awareness of – but not necessarily adherence to – mortality is pervasive. Her entities bleed, secrete and eject. Birthing, dying, healing and regenerating endlessly.

Tentacular and purgatory super-species — plant-like, animal-like, anthropomorphic and absurd — reach through almost every plane illustrated. Informed by Donna Harraway’s ‘Tentacular Thinking’ and the ‘Chthulucene’, these tentacled lifeforms stand for the other and the non-human. They ask us to explore expansively and somatically, by implementing a way of existing and seeing that isn't two-armed, two-eyed, two-eared and one-brained, but many-armed and many-brained.
The scenes Pandey depicts do not accede to a linear, colonised time and space. Barren landscapes have potential to become domestic spaces and often exist as both simultaneously. Similarly, the narratives in Pandey’s paintings revoke dichotomisation. Futurity is explored without a requirement for separation from the ancient and mystical. She navigates paths of inquiry that do not utilise hierarchy. Both the scientific and the mythological have equal footing.In this way, the paintings are a worldbuilding exercise.

Pandey’s painted dioramas appear to be surrealist; nonetheless, they transcend this categorisation. Approaching narrative inquiry through an ecological lens, Pandey’s matter expands into a super-ecological surrealism that speaks not of the end of the world. Rather, it challenges us to picture its fantastical continuation.