Anita Agarwal

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  I am a multidisciplinary artist from India presently based in London and Mumbai. Working across moving image, performance, installation, mark-making, print. My practice is dialogical, socially engaged and activistic in its approach. I am a feminist who through my art practice interrogates and pushes the socio-political parameters experienced in day-to-day life, these could be my own lived experience or of others.

 

  I call myself a "Respons(able)" artist; someone once told me that being responsible means being able to respond. As a visual artist, I respond to an event, a site, or a provocation through my work. My response, although intuitive is built on a strong foundation of comprehensive research, to sieve out ‘any emotional hyperbole, false consciousness, madness or the perfunctory navel-gazing of the self-absorbed’. Audre Lorde writes that ‘emotions’ are one's political and life resources, and that we must make use of our anger/our frustrations, letting the anger spill out into a poem or a text. And that's the point of departure for any of my work, a poem or a text, which later develops and morphs into other formats.

 

  I strive to achieve playfulness and humour in my works, as through humour it is possible to collide into other spaces, allowing people to relax and ease out into areas that would be otherwise difficult and awkward to navigate.

 

  Having travelled and lived in diverse cultures and geographies, archives, and social histories inform a provocative approach to storytelling within my practice. My work explores the intersections and positions within cultures, that are often mirrored in nuanced texts/everyday phrases; reasons of their existence and origins fascinate me, often becoming the starting point of my work. These cultures when in juxtaposition create interesting contrasts and patterns of intrigue and humour. Literature by Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Emma Goldman, Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde and Grant H. Kester has influenced and inspired me in my journey. 

 

  Art provides me with an opportunity to fiercely engage with the world through the lens of indigenous philosophies of universality and oneness of not only the living but also non-living from my Asian/Indian roots, in opposition to a western Anthropocene mindset/philosophy. Revolutionary thinkers like Donna Haraway and Silvia Federici prove to be the great beacons for my practice-led research providing a 3rd plane/axis in kinship and assimilation. 

 

  There is a continual search to create spaces through curating such spaces or, through the participatory workshops where fearless response is possible. I am inspired by The Feedback Theatre, and the Array collective. I enjoy working in collaboration with other artists, as I feel that it brings out the best in me. I am particularly inspired by the collaborations of Sheila Galani & Sue Palmer; Keiken, and Cao Fei.

 

  I try to initiate and collaborate to create spaces to reflect, imagine and strive for possible new (ideal) worlds. As well as create spaces where the responses to these reflections and imaginations can be possible. Spaces, where one comes individually or collectively together in the form of workshops, exhibitions, or public interventions. This has resulted in collaborative curatorial endeavours such as SW11NDOWS and  AP.AART.MENT77 . 

 

  Sustainability for me is a way of living, a way of being, both as an individual and an artist. As an artist, my way of working and the choice of materials is very much informed by it. Sustainability and sustainable lifestyles are a subject that I am passionately engaging in throughout my practice.

 

 

 

 

 

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