Women to Watch
Date: 17th November
Time: 12:00 PM 1:00 PM
About
Women to Watch is an exhibition program at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, that features internationally emerging artists from countries where the museum has an outreach of committees. For the seventh edition of Women to Watch 2024, India participated for the first time with a committee that presented five Indian women artists to watch. These five artists will be in conversation with NMWA Committee Member, the India committee chair and India committee curator, to speak about their practices, the Women to Watch platform and the role of India’s participation in the program.
Speakers
Ilene Gutman
Prajakta Potnis
Prarthna Singh
Rajyashri Goody
Ayesha Singh
Farah Mulla
Minal Vazirani
Moderator
Veerangana Solanki
About the Speakers
Following her graduation from Parsons School of Design and the New School, Ilene Gutman began working as a freelance illustrator and from 1972-1984, her works were published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, in The Washington Post and The New York Review of Books, among others. She has been Deputy Director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts since 2008. Prior to that she was the Director of National and International Affairs, during which time she was tasked with building state and international committees/affiliates and the museum’s Advisory Board.
Rajyashri Goody has a B.A in Sociology from Fergusson College, Pune and an M.A in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester, UK. She has had two solo shows - with Galleryske, New Delhi and Clark House Initiative, Mumbai, and group shows across the world. She was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam from 2021-2023.
Goody's art practice is informed by her academic background and her Ambedkarite Dalit roots. She is interested in creating space and time for thinking through everyday instances of caste-based violence and Dalit resistance, and how elements like food, nature, language and literacy are actively used as tools to enforce caste rules for generations. She lives and works in India and the Netherlands.
Farah Mulla is a multimedia artist. Her background in science overlaps with her art practice that explores the perception of sound and its effects on human neurology and subjectivity. Often investigating different media, she uses the human voice, field recordings and other modes of inquiries to explore aspects of our listening experience and the invisible agency of sound via multiple modes of perception.
Prajakta Potnis’s art practice digs deeper into the nexus between the frailty of a human body and the greed of a capitalist state. Through the process of paintings, radiology, video and time-based installations, she examines the overburdened female body that has been incessantly exposed to varied forms of toxicity. Her works draw upon the chasm witnessed within the everyday domestic in context of gender and social divide.
Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in a number of solo and group exhibitions, including A Body Without Organs and When the wind blows, Project 88, Mumbai (2020, 2016) and as well as Imaged Documents curated by Ravi Agarwal at the 2022 Rencontres d'Arles, Arles (2022). Her most recent project is a part of Thinking Historically in the Present, conceived by the late Okwui Enwezoe and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi for the 15th Sharjah Biennale (2023). The artist lives and works in Mumbai, India.
Prarthna Singh is a visual artist whose work explores questions of identity and gender, especially as they intersect with the fraught politics of nationalism in contemporary India. Her images reflect on the economic and political trajectory of the country, drawing connections between feminine precariousness and vulnerability, on one hand, and radical acts of strength and solidarity on the other. She lives and works in Mumbai, India and has recently self-published her book Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh: One Hundred Days of Resistance which was named one of the best photobooks of 2022 by LensCulture. Her work has appeared in TIME, The New York Times, FT Weekend, The Economist, The Guardian, Monocle, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg News. This year her work has been exhibited at Rencontres d'Arles, Raw Photo Triennale, Worpswede, Thessaloniki PhotoBiennále and The National Portrait Gallery, London.
Ayesha Singh's practice involves subversive actions that highlight existing socio-political hierarchies and the assertion of established systems of power in architecture. Through drawing, kinetic mechanics, participatory performances, photography, public installations, sculpture and video, the works create sites of discourse and record, to question the assumed permanence of buildings and the histories omitted during construction, restoration and destruction. Singh has exhibited in solo and group shows at Museum of Art and Photography (Bangalore, India); Academy of Fine Arts (Vienna, Austria); Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK); Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati, USA); Museum of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (Chongqing, China); and Karachi Biennale (Karachi, Pakistan).
Veeranganakumari Solanki is an independent curator and writer based in India. She is interested in the way interdisciplinary forms and creative practices merge to create dialogues in public and private spaces and the convergence of images across disciplines. Further, her research and practice consider how historical and contemporary thought informs exhibition-making and artistic practices. Solanki was the 2019 Brooks International Research Fellow at Tate Modern and a resident at the Delfina Foundation. Currently, she is the Programme Director at Space Studio, Baroda, a Director of the SqwLab Foundation and teaches the Curatorial Practice MFA course at Kathmandu University. She is also a curatorial advisor for Art Mumbai 2023’s sculpture garden and a visual arts curator for the Serendipity Arts Festival 2023.
Minal Vazirani co-founded Saffronart, a leading auction house based around the world and the Saffronart Foundation, which uses art as an enabler to raise awareness about key social issues, support community outreach, and contribute to the development of south Asian visual art. She chairs the India Committee for Women to Watch, 2024, an exhibition developed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), Washington, D.C. Vazirani is also on the acquisitions committee at the Tate Modern, UK. In 2005, she led a review of Saffronart’s business when the Harvard Business School published a case study on the company. Vazirani received her MBA from INSEAD in France, where she received the Sasakawa Fellowship, and her B.S. in Chemical Engineering with an additional focus on Art History and Indian History from the University of California, Los Angeles.