If the wind could speak, what would it say? Would it answer my anxieties about losing thespaces of my freedom? Will it tell me, why the cherished arena of my liberty hurts someone somuch that they feel the need to trample it? Will it console my vulnerable mind, when thegarden of knowledge that has nurtured me has been infested and stained?The work enunciates these troubling questions into the visual surface.These anxieties arise from traces of recent historical events such as the pogrom of 2002 inGujarat and the rise of totalitarian Hindutva forces in our political, cultural and educationalspaces in recent time and how they have managed to fester violence below a thin membrane ofnormalized activity. This work indulges into the above mentioned traits and tries to negotiate asense of helplessness and a fear of losing the spaces of liberal interactions that is the soul of oursocio-political fabric.A garden is often something close to our hearts. It is something that is built with care andcherished with love. In this work I have tried to arrange plants, and delicately paint the leavesand petals that flower against the darkness of the surface. However, gardens are notcompletely natural. In fact, it is an intervention within the usual habitat that needs to beguarded from the evils of the outer world. Here the brick walls painted in shades of brown actsas an enclosed space and is further fortified with shards of glass as secure fencing. Thoughthere is an uncertainty about whether it is capable of protecting the garden against theimpending storm that has razed the city outside.What seems as an apparent visually pleasurable view of the garden (synonymous to ‘Ache Din’),offers a rather bleak picture with a little more close introspection. A close interaction wouldreveal that the painting is replete with miniature imageries and symbols of disharmony, chaos,turmoil, death and danger. The interjections of architectural constructions with their weary andwashed off colours and the broken unkempt trees speak of a space whose care takers have lefttheir cherished spaces. Intermittent clouds of smoke across the surface of the painting, whitesharp linear tracings of objects such as cased a human heart, oil jars, dead doves, sickles, trisul,that are hidden along the dark patches or displayed in glass cases or are hidden along the darkpatches of land, to indicate an ominous, violent undertaking of the past.These objects belong to my fictional museum of grief. Weapons that may have participated inmayhem, a buried fetus, vultures, upturned vehicle, skeleton of a home, chained peacock theystand as a witness of the time and a record of its crime. Like the often pungent waft of the
marigold flowers, or the charcoal smell of the smoke arising from the blazes burning humanflesh or of dried leaves, the answer to this question is too blowing in the wind. They are just tooeasy or common to be spelled out.Puja Mondal is a visual artist based in Baroda. She obtained her Masters and Bachelors Degree inpainting from the Faculty of Fine-Arts, MSU, Baroda in the years 2019 and 2017 respectively. She hasbeen a part of several group shows like ‘Ask the Clouds to Remember’ curated by ShreemoyeeMoitra at Akara Art Gallery 2022, ‘Baroda Annuelle’, at Gallery White, Baroda 2021. She was alsopart of Delhi Contemporary Art Week in 2021 presented by Shrine Empire Gallery, ‘Zones ofConvergence/ Divergence’ an online group show presented by Guild Art Gallery. She was a part ofthe Master’s Practise Studio organized by The Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2018. She was selected forthe program of Khoj Peers Share on 2018. Recently she was granted the IMAGINARIUM 2.0,Emerging artist award by Emami Art, Kolkata (2022), and ‘Artist support Grant’, funded by KhojStudios , New Delhi (2021). She is awarded the Nasreen Mohamedi scholarship from her alma mater.She is a recipient of awards like “Lt Milind Madhukar Bhade” Gold Medal 2019 and “NarendraGajanan Bhatt” Gold Medal 2019 from prestigious Maharaja Sayaji Rao University in Baroda. Shereceived the National Award for painting by Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi in 2016.