The Italian Embassy Cultural Centre brings together six women artists from Italy and South Asia who are reinterpreting and reimagining current concerns using paper, multimedia, dyes, scriptures and food. When Art and the feminist gestalt forces came together in Delhi at the exhibition ‘Visions in the Making’, the result is a quilted canvas of woman power, folklore, new materials, reinterpreted styles and the crisis of faith. Of the six women, artists from Italy and South Asia on show, Gopa Trivedi who graduated from MS University, Vadodara, and Shristi School-product Shilo Suleiman are two young Indian faces who represent the new non-traditional visage of Indian art. Outré surfaces, cultural motifs, photo art, illustration, architecture, food, paper, geometry, new media, video—the exhibition is a tour de force of enigma and experiment. Gopa is the neo-miniaturist, while Shilo, the experimental searcher, Natascia Fenoglio, the culinary impresario, Marta Roberti, is an artist and philosopher, Stefania Galegati Shines, the narrative romantic and Amina Ahmed, Islamic diaspora’s interrogator.
Unlike Gopa’s socio-political references, Shilo explores nature, intimacy and mythology through her work. She has a yen for photo performance. Art for her is a bridge connecting different divine narratives from the Koran, the piety of Kannada poet Mahadevi Akka to the 12th century epic Gita Govinda by Jayadeva. The sheer versatility of the artists is breathtaking. Take Natascia’s installation named ‘Alfabet’. She is a culinary aesthete and teacher, who specialises in custom-creative design services involving stage design and gourmet meals, and works with food companies to identify and refine culinary and nutritional habits. In the current exhibition, she collaborated with local chefs to create ‘edible hands’ about the ritual significance of gestures of Italians and Indians.