How Shanthi Swaroopini and Michal Glikson turn the personal and the peripatetic into art

Eurasia Antipodes is a travel journal like no other. A 10mt scroll unfolding across the walls, it is a work of art spanning countries and continents. Figures and stories, flora and fauna flow into each other, rendered in the style of miniature art and awash in watercolours. Stamps and other found objects punctuate the art, and hand-written diary entries reveal hidden stories and reflections that Michal Glikson, the peripatetic Australian artist behind the work, experienced across her travels. Scrolls are Glikson’s travel companions, journeying with her and transforming into memory keepers. “One reason for my using scrolls, and there are quite a few, is that they unfold constantly,” says the artist who paints her scrolls from left to right but it is only semi-chronological. “An artist can start at either end, and so can the viewer. A scroll has no pagination.”

Several of Glikson sprawling scrolls, along with her videos, are on display in Delhi, at Threshold Art Gallery’s new multidisciplinary exhibition, Intimate Terrains. Apart from Glikson, the show presents the drawings and sculptures of Hyderabad-based Shanthi Swaroopini in an exploration of questions around identity, displacement and the body as a conduit of lived experience. “Though emerging from different cultural and geographic contexts, both artists share a formative pedagogical ground at MS University of Baroda, which shapes their distinct yet resonant approaches,” writes Tunty Chauhan, curator and director of Threshold in the exhibition catalogue. “Together they reveal that identity is neither fixed nor singular, but a constant negotiation, an Intimate Terrain shaped by experience, place, movement memory and the stories we choose to carry.”

Shanthi’s works contemplate lived experience and inter-generational memories in a practice devoted to material explorations. A series of exquisite sculptures, titled Dark Waters, situates feminine figures in layers of brass, copper and terracotta. The bodies are in continuous acts of negotiation—disappearing and emerging, both tangled in the mass yet distinct from it. The unpredictable alchemy of metals and terracotta is a means of bringing together the familiar and the unknown, both in form and meaning for the artist whose practice is rooted in exploring the possibilities of materials. Metals and terracotta are not the only materials in Shanthi’s repertoire. At the exhibition, she points to a series of drawings, part of the Influx series, made during the pandemic, red and pink bodies and faces flecked with shapes made using cotton—her own take on found materials. “I wanted to use organic materials,” she says, recalling previous experiences with tea washes and parchment leather. “I had never worked with cotton and I was trying to understand the material—and how it would overlap a painted surface.”

With some using mixed media, and other incorporating watercolours, Shanthi’s drawings translate her engagement with feminine experience and identity from sculpture to paper—depicting shapes and figures whose inner lives seem to spread out of their physical contours.

Juxtaposed with Shanthi’s examination of what lies within, Glikson looks outwards. One of her attraction to scrolls is also for its associations with mythology and storytelling. “I am a street artist drawing from reality, and mythologizing that reality is a lovely way to elevate the ordinary,” she says. “A lot of people feel ordinary and I love the idea of using miniature and the scroll to work with somebody’s story and make it beautiful. It’s not about sanitising their often painful reality, but the understanding that their reality too can be multi-coloured and complex.” This perspective extends to her video art exhibits, Dear Safia (2013) and Sitakshi and the Pink Skirt (2016), narrating the stories of two women in different cities framed by their environments.

If Shanthi’s makes interiority more expansive, Glikson brings what is external closer. In different approaches to lived experience, and a shared interest in exploring materials and medium, their art stand in dialogue with each other at the gallery.

(‘Intimate Terrains’ is on view at Threshold Art Gallery till February 28.)