Artistic expressions of lockdown chores

Some chose to channel their feelings into art and created works that captured what a woman went through and is still going through in the after-effects of the pandemic.

If one were to say women across the country got the short end of the stick during the lockdown, it wouldn’t be a far-fetched statement. For all the talk about getting more time to pursue hobbies and finally tackling long-pending to-do lists, women seemingly got chained to the house, more specifically the kitchen. Cooking different dishes morning, noon, and night had many harried women thinking of the days when the self-imposed drudgery would end.

Some chose to channel their feelings into art and created works that captured what a woman went through and is still going through in the after-effects of the pandemic. The virtual exhibition, ‘Cooking Up a Storm’ is a curation of 14 works by female artists from across the country spread across mixed media, performative art and abstracts.

Curator and artist Koeli Mukherjee says, “Covid-19 pandemic was a difficult time for women who not only had to juggle work from home, children, but also non-stop work in the kitchen. So the idea was really to capture the travails of women here. Fortunately, many female artists managed to find time to paint during this time and those became part of the showcase.”

Among the artists showing their works in the online exhibit are Sravanthi Juluri, Jaya Baheti, Farzona Khanoon, Palakshi Das, Sahithi Kalyanam, Koeli Mukherjee Ghose, to name a few.
Most works follow the recurring theme of women shackled by their responsibilities of home and domestic life. Some like Koeli’s works are satires, as seen in, ‘Lockdown Mother’ that shows a woman bogged down by the many dishes she has to prepare.

Artist Sahithi Kalyanam’s work is more performance-oriented and features real photographs of the artist with colour added in artificially in the conceptual face art ‘Raw Wounds’ that talks about warring with emptiness and the glimmer of hope of something better that comes with it.

A particularly haunting image is that of Sabitha Lakshmanan whose work ‘Brain Dead Under a Clear Sky’ takes up societal ills that afflict every woman. Words like sexual abuse, domestic violence, stereotypes of good girl, bad girl, shame try to snake around a woman in bloody shackles who is forced to bend in order to fit in a societal framework.

Farzona’s subject fights from the womb for the right to live, portrayed beautifully with the striking red. The exhibition is on view till April 3 on the Goethe-Zentrum Hyderabad website.