Important Notice

The series of mixed media paper-pulp and print works that Atul Dodiya created during his residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) in 2005 offers insight into the artist’s ongoing, critical examination of personal narratives, communal violence and national politics. According to Nancy Adajania , “Dodiya has never allowed himself to be constricted by a particular stylistic choice or medium: his continuities have been staged through... The series of mixed media paper-pulp and print works that Atul Dodiya created during his residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) in 2005 offers insight into the artist’s ongoing, critical examination of personal narratives, communal violence and national politics. According to Nancy Adajania , “Dodiya has never allowed himself to be constricted by a particular stylistic choice or medium: his continuities have been staged through self-disruptions, an extension into new methods and spaces, an addressing of parallel arts and discourses…It is against this backdrop of restless inventiveness that Dodiya’s work at the STPI should be viewed” (“Sabari in Singapore: The Testimony of a Pirate King”, The Wet Sleeves of My Paper Robe, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, Singapore, 2006, p. 8, 9).

Engaging with the history of India through its epic mythology, Dodiya draws on the story of the tribal woman Sabari, one of the many narratives of the subaltern contained within the epic Ramayana. Following in the footsteps of Nandalal Bose, who explored the story in a 1941 series of paintings, Dodiya elevates Sabari to the role of protagonist, and uses the chronicle of her lifelong devotion to Ram to explore the ways in which the epic is has been recently misappropriated in the name of right-wing politics in India, particularly in the state of Gujarat. As a result, this series of work can be read as “…a critical engagement with a history of India, a claim to the shaping of India’s future as a space of inclusiveness”, and one that calls for “…a fresh valuation of the past… a realisation of the fatuity of monolithic interpretations of tradition, identity and belonging” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Amplitudes of Connection”, Ibid., p. 25).

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