Employing a variety of found objects drawn from the realms of the industrial (foam, plastic, wire), craft (thread, beads, velvet), the body (dentures, bone), and the readymade (ceramic eyes), Dube investigates a very human concern with both personal and societal loss and regeneration.

Her most famous one being, ‘Silence (Blood Wedding)’ entails her wrapping  an actual skeleton and all the detailed bones with velvet.

In 1997, Dube began working with a new material, the industrially manufactured ceramic eyes that are affixed to Hindu religious statues commonly found in Indian temples. She initially used these variably sized eyes in site-specific ways, attaching them to the spot in a room where the ceiling meets two walls to form a corner, as in ’Intimations of Mortality’.

In works such as Disease (River) (1999), the ceramic eyes began to move, branching out across the wall like a virus or a flooding river. Although her work evokes a number of meanings, one can think about these wall pieces in terms of the various modes of human migration in the contemporary world. As Dube suggests, “The eyes are like people for me and this could speak of large migrations in history.” In this light, the eyes take on less of a horror-film quality and instead stand in metonymically for the mass of humanity that has been forced to relocate due to political persecution, economic deprivation, or the relentless effects of global development that push people from the countryside into the city. This use of the sculptural fragment to subtly invoke a humanist critical agenda speaks to her uncompromising desire to tangentially address the social through metaphorical means.

I like the way she brings beauty, texture and richness to objects are mostly considered ‘gross’.

Bharti caught my eye with her unique style of using ‘Bindis’ as a medium of her work and to express her emotion by employing the object to twist connotation. 

The term bindi is derived from bindu, the Sanskrit word for a dot or a point, and also carries the meaning of the numeral zero. The bindi in India is traditionally a mark of pigment applied to the forehead and is associated with the Hindu symbol of the third eye. When worn by women in the customary colour of red, it is a symbol of marriage. In recent times it has become a decorative item, worn by unmarried girls and women of other religions as well. Today’s bindis are commercially manufactured in many colours and designs.

Kher uses the ready-made bindi as a central motif of her practice. This tiny decoration is used as a means of transforming objects and surfaces. Her use of the bindi brings to her art a range of meanings and connotations across historical and contemporary periods. She is known for her menagerie of resin-cast animals, which are covered with the bindi, and she also uses the bindi to make large, wall-based panels. These sensual abstract surfaces may be described as swirls of contrasting coloured dots and shapes.

The link that might tie me and Bharti is the idea of using bindis. Which leads me on to a path to create something with the Red Bindi, to simplify marriage but eventually distort it to create the irony in the subject.

Some of her works are:

“Like 80 percent of the population in India, I grew up carrying my lunch in these tiffin pots,” says the 43-year-old artist, a stern-looking but soft-spoken man who grew up in the countryside and now resides in Delhi.

Interestingly he says, “The objects I pick already have their own significance. I put them together to create new meanings.” 

Another of Gupta’s tiffin-pot sculptures, a giant skull titled Very Hungry God (2006), gained new meaning and iconic status last summer in Venice. “The work speaks to the cultural context through the skull imagery, which is an omnipresent motif in Venetian art and architecture,” says Alison Gingeras, chief curator at the palace, which shows works from François Pinault’s collection. “The overlap between the very precise cultural meaning relating to Gupta’s home country and the particular iconography of the city of Venice has made this work not only a huge popular success, but also has given rise to a rich cross-cultural and art-historical dialogue.” 

Cow (2005), a cast-bronze bicycle hung with shiny aluminum buckets, embodies the idea that “the bicycle is like a mechanized cow in the city,” explains Gupta. “In the country if I wanted milk, I would go to the cows to get it; in the city it is delivered to you by bicycle.” The polished finish of the work is appropriate for an object of veneration, which both cows and art are in different cultural contexts. Gupta has also worked with cow dung to explore the contrasts between city and country, old and new. In his video Pure (2000), the artist, thickly covered in manure, is slowly hosed off until he is naked. “Where I grew up, cow dung was used for spiritual cleansing,” he says, “something no longer believed in the city.” 

I think the closest relation i can find with the artist is, “My work is about where I come from,” he says. “But at the same time the expansion of the art world means that to a certain extent, everything is shrinking together, and you have to be aware of international discourses in your work.” Which i my point of view is very true. 

Certainly Gupta deals with Indian themes in a way that appeals to the Western eye. I want to keep in mind that even if i can making art to unionize my target audience or address Indian culture i cannot make it entirely Indian in terms of legibility and comprehension of the art piece.

Some other works: