The Geometry of Ash: Anju Dodiya

Politics of Pause

The champas in Anju Dodiya’s Ghatkopar studio haven’t flowered this year.
The garden that once perfumed the air now stands bare, its stillness broken by honking and construction on a lane that once held a school and a Jain monastery. Inside, the terrazzo floor has begun to crack; the fissures feel deliberate, echoing ruptures that mark our time — social, political, ecological, and deeply personal.

In this uneasy quiet, Anju’s new body of work takes shape. Surfaces are stretched like rooms divided by invisible seams. Each section of canvas, layered and collaged, holds its own world yet bleeds into the next. A solitary hand gestures toward a cluster of mourners that recalls Gaza. Lovers twist into branches. The body contorts, caught between longing and violence.

Fabrics sourced from small shops across the world become the skin of these paintings. A wax print from West Africa injects a sudden jolt of colour; a stained British Museum tea towel becomes the canvas for another.

Figures familiar from her earlier work return transformed. The pencil, once a tool of imagination, now oscillates between instrument and weapon. Hotel-room isolation gives way to painted collages on found books. Folded papers painted black open into small abysses.

And then, the logs.

Inspired by Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s meditation on dread, Anju reimagines the woman who carries her log as both burden and companion. For her, trees are ancient ancestors — constant, vertical witnesses to history. In Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of Gandhi’s funeral, crowds climb trees to see. In Giotto’s frescoes, boys peer down from branches. Trees have always watched us. In this show, they return as both evidence and elegy.

Daphne, that ancient figure of flight and transformation, shadows these works. In earlier works, Daphne’s metamorphosis was brutal, her body pierced. Here, Daphne reappears mischievous, rebellious, perhaps finally free. She swings, reads, indulges in her escape. Yet, the spectre of capture lingers. How long does freedom last before it calcifies into myth?

That question hums beneath the surface of every painting. When the champas refuse to bloom, when political slogans echo through school loudspeakers, when the city outside collapses into noise — can Anju, can any of us, still find happiness? Her work suggests that perhaps we can, if only fleetingly. That joy and dread are no longer opposites but two sides of the same trembling surface.

Anju speaks of stillness not as passivity, but as resistance. In an age of urgency, of constant outrage and digital noise, her paintings compel us to pause. They demand attention, not consumption. They refuse polemic, yet they are political in the deepest sense — offering space for reflection when space itself feels endangered.

This, perhaps, is Anju Dodiya’s most radical gesture: to hold a quiet room in a world that will not stop shouting.

Anish Gawande. 2025