Draft:Shelly Bahl

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Shelly Bahl
MovementContemporary Art Contemporary Asian Art Contemporary South Asian Art Contemporary Indian Art Contemporary Canadian Art Contemporary American Art Feminist Art Feminist Artists
Website[1]

Shelly Bahl is an Indian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator, currently based in NYC. Her interdisciplinary work in drawing, painting, sculpture/ installation, performance, photography and video has appeared in many solo and group exhibitions in North America and internationally since the mid-1990s.[1]

Early life and education[edit]

Shelly Bahl was born in Benares, India in 1970, raised in a few Indian cities, and later in Toronto, Canada. She is currently based in New York City. She received her BFA (Visual Art and Art History, 1993) from York University, Toronto and her MA (Studio Art, 1995) from New York University.[2]

Career[edit]

Shelly Bahl is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator and decolonizing art trailblazer. She has been leading and participating in BIPOC and feminist artist-run culture in Toronto and NYC since the mid-1990s. She is a founding artist member of SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) and ZEN-MIX 2000: Pan-Asian Visual Arts Network in Toronto.[3]

She is also an artist member of South Asian Women's Creative Collective (SAWCC), and Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network.

She is an artist member of The Paglees feminist artist collective with 6 other mid-career artists of South Asian descent based in the USA. The Paglees debut exhibition was launched in January 2024 at the South Asia Institute in Chicago.[4]

Themes[edit]

Shelly Bahl's interdisciplinary art practice explores the strange and surreal aspects of cultural hybridity and old and new forms of colonization. She is interested in the global transmission of iconographies and other forms of visual culture. She also investigates the surrealistic experiences of women who lead enigmatic trans-cultural lives. These narratives are based in facts and fictions rooted in specific cultural histories, which she then re-contextualizes and re-imagines.[5]

Bahl’s artwork often examines the dynamics of South Asian culture, especially as it relates to women in the diaspora. This can be seen in her photo series, "A Day In the Life," (2007), shot at the now closed Terminal 2 at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. In the surreally depopulated airport, a sort of signifier of transitory and transcultural space, the women in Bahl’s photos exchange social roles in ways that would be uncomfortable or unthinkable in actuality. The expensively dressed traveller, for example, is seen matter-of-factly mopping a toilet stall (considered an insultingly distasteful job in South Asian culture) in a complete subversion of her traditional status.

This gently off-kilter social commentary continues in her video piece "Pink Is The Navy Blue Of India," (2003), in which Bahl again addresses notions of subcontinental “exoticism” and the appropriation of South Asian culture.[6]

Her interdisciplinary works also examine women's labour and traditional women's craft and handiworks. She often utilizes commercial wallpapers and decorative patterns. For example, Bahl’s drawing, “Karma Chameleon #1,” (2007), is an ink drawing of punk-rock girls raking leaves, sharply delineated in heavy black ink against a background of floral wallpaper. It impresses for many reasons, not the least of which is that the artist brings the ghoulish and decorative into contiguous alignment. It also touches lightly on women’s work and the association with domesticity.[7]

Bahl's feminist perspective can be seen in her longest running art project, an ongoing sculpture series with melting wax female figurines (1994 -to the present day). Shelly Bahl’s work in burning wax lends further atmospheric gravity and spiritual ambiance within gallery spaces. Bahl’s work reveals a slow decapitation of figures with breasts and hips – an intervention that recalls myriad abuses of the female body in the name of organized religion.[8]

In 2022-23, she was a Visiting Artist/ Co-curator of Be(Coming) The Museum at the Lahore Museum in Pakistan. She presented a site-specific installation in the museum's Hindu, Buddhist and Jain galleries that examined the politics of being in a third culture, with the representation of the female body in the hyper world of commercialised media. Bahl then re-visits and re-imagines the truths and fiction grounded in particular cultural histories with wide-ranging artistic concerns related to identity, diaspora, cultural hybridity, and gender politics.

The melted wax figures in her work Songs of Lament: Ceremonal-Trinity were kept before the four-headed Lion Capital of Ashoka—these were burnt down and fused in pools of red and white. According to Bahl, the historical objects held in museums still have exciting stories to tell even after defacing due to colonial plunder and post-colonial neglect.[9]

Bahl's interdisciplinary project, "Sisters of Shakti," is the artist's first use of AI generated imagery in her social commentary and story-telling. Shelly Bahl’s interactive, speculative community Sisters of Shakti (2021-present) exposes the dangers of centering white feminism, especially the ways in which it betrays women of color. Three AI-generated images, blown up and framed, advertise trios of white women assuming postures drawn from South Asian religious practices, such as anjali mudra—a greeting hand gesture that means “offering.” From afar, they are a familiar face for yoga and wellness retreats on social media, but close-up, their expressions are anything but serene. One strains in meditation, mouth curved in a deep frown. Another stares eyes open, smirking threateningly at the viewer. “Come to your Sisters!” reads the invitation above her head. But in whose reality is this sisterhood situated? To which kinds of experiences are they reacting?[10]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Shelly Bahl". Rungh Cultural Society.
  2. ^ "Shelly Bahl | Asian Arts Initiative". asianartsinitiative.org.
  3. ^ "Panel Discussion - Evaporation, Condensation, Precipitation, Collection". January 31, 2023.
  4. ^ "The Paglees: Between Reason and Madness". South Asia Institute. 2024-02-13. Retrieved 2024-02-19.
  5. ^ "Seed > Root - Concordia University". www.concordia.ca. Retrieved 2024-02-19.
  6. ^ Jager, David (2007-03-29). "Bahl throws some curves - NOW Magazine". NOW Toronto. Retrieved 2023-07-11.
  7. ^ Genocchio, Benjamin (2008-07-13). "A Collection Born of Cultural Dislocation". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-07-11.
  8. ^ yusi (2022-10-07). "Contemporary Exhibition Inspired by the Sacred – ALTER – Leaves One Changed". The Offing. Retrieved 2023-07-11.
  9. ^ "Re-Configuring the Drawls and Tangs of History - The Karachi Collective". 2023-05-23. Retrieved 2023-07-11.
  10. ^ Wei, Wendy (2024-01-26). "The Paglees color the lens of collective feminism". Chicago Reader. Retrieved 2024-02-19.

External links[edit]



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