A life less ordinary: Rekha Rodwittiya

Acclaimed artist Rekha Rodwittiya has served as an important voice for the feminist movement in India. She is known for paying tribute to the female form and its indefatigable spirit through her works, thereby questioning the patriarchal system. The Baroda-based creator continues this tradition with her upcoming solo exhibition titled Rekha@Sixty:Transient Worlds Of Belonging, which opens at Sakshi Gallery, on November 1. It celebrates her 60th birthday through new pieces that look back on her physical and spiritual journey across six decades. They carry her myriad experiences of life where the personal and the political are intertwined to create allegorical images. Along with a 60-piece series of paintings, the show will also have some hitherto-unseen multimedia works. She tells After Hrs how her personal experiences have mingled with lessons from the outside world. Excerpts…

How do you feel when you look back at your artistic trajectory?

What excites me is living within the here and the now — along with the anticipation that tomorrow holds the possibilities of new hope. I’ve been greatly privileged with access to education and nurtured as a female child to grow as an empowered individual. What has always been important to me is how I can define the territory of intentions within my art and how I can articulate my politics. As an artist, I understand and associate my connection with the world through the lens of humanism and I continue to desire that my art retains reflecting my relationship with the world.

How significant is this exhibition to you? 

Each exhibition is a relevant marker within one’s journey of negotiating a world full of discoveries and explorations. Six decades have passed and the insistence remains loud and clear with unfailing clarity and haunting persistent, to hear my own voice echo to me the anthem of female empowerment.

How would you describe these 60 works?

Images from everyday life that inhabit my work are always subtexts that act as indicators to reveal the territory of more detailed enquiries. The objects I use establish my relationship with the world at large, and in particular. They are often possessions that I own, from which I extract metaphors and formulate a personalised symbology. The spirit of the woman is indomitable as they continue to commit their energies to nurture life through their amazing capacity to define self-dignity and offer lessons of forgiveness — to remain the possessor of Shakti and find their empowerment unaided, and it is this that becomes the central axis to all the works in this exhibition.

You’ve examined life as well as the reality of the human existence through the prism of feminist inquiries. How successful have you been in this endeavour?

The female figure as a central image is not accidental. It is consciously placed as an endorsement of female victory. My content is culled from the everyday life of the woman — to be perceived and witnessed and acknowledged. It is through the lives of the ordinary that we best witness the ideals of any ideology. From the many stories about the courage of ordinary women, both rural and urban that have championed women’s rights in the subcontinent, I have found my strength.

Rekha@Sixty:Transient Worlds of Belonging is on view at Sakshi Gallery, Colaba, from November 1 to 30, from 11 am to 6 pm.