Overview
Works
Essay
Intimate Terrains
Shared Ground, Distinct Journeys
Intimate Terrains brings together drawings and sculptures by Hyderabad based Shanthi Swaroopini and paintings and videos by the peripatetic Australian artist Michal Glikson.
The exhibition becomes a site where their distinct vocabularies intertwine, revealing the many ways an artwork can become an archive of presence, vulnerability, encounter, and transformation.
While separated by background, geography, and sensibility, Swaroopini and Glikson share an important point of convergence: both trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. For Swaroopini and Glikson, arriving at Baroda from different contexts meant entering a space where international modernist legacies met local histories, where Indian miniature painting could coexist with performance, where sculpture could be approached as a temporal process rather than a static form.
Swaroopini and Glikson’s works differ dramatically in surface and scale – one sculptural and densely layered, the other elongated, portable, and often diaristic.
Swaroopini’s drawings and sculptures are shaped by cycles of construction and erasure, accumulation and removal. In her hands, the female form becomes a site of negotiation between fragility and strength, vulnerability and assertion. What appears on the surface is never the whole story; what has been erased remains palpable, a ghostly insistence that form is never fixed.
Glikson’s practice, unfolding across travels through Australia, India, Pakistan, and beyond, forms a complementary counterpoint. Her scrolls function as unfurling diaries – repositories for encounters, conversations, fragments of landscape, and the residue of movement.
Their practices, distinct yet resonant, reveal how contemporary art rooted in local contexts can also speak expansively across borders.
Deeksha Nath
Desk Editor, Art AsiaPacific
Trustee, Artreach India
Notes
Curatorial Note
Intimate Terrains brings together the work of Shanthi Swaroopini and Michal Glikson, two multidisciplinary artists whose practices converge around questions of identity, displacement, and the body as a carrier of lived experience. Though emerging from different cultural and geographic contexts, both artists share a formative pedagogical ground at M.S. University of Baroda, which shapes their distinct yet resonant approaches. Though distinct in form and method, they share a deep engagement with identity, displacement, and the body as a vessel of lived experience.
While Shanthi centers personal experience in the body, Glikson maps collective experience in motion and dialogue. Shanthi works inward – using tactile, intimate forms to explore the body as a site of emotional and ancestral memory.
Michal works outward – mapping lived journeys, encounters, and shifting geography through her travelling scrolls.
Intimate Terrains brings together the work of Shanthi Swaroopini and Michal Glikson, two multidisciplinary artists whose practices converge around questions of identity, displacement, and the body as a carrier of lived experience. Though emerging from different cultural and geographic contexts, both artists share a formative pedagogical ground at M.S. University of Baroda, which shapes their distinct yet resonant approaches. Though distinct in form and method, they share a deep engagement with identity, displacement, and the body as a vessel of lived experience.
While Shanthi centers personal experience in the body, Glikson maps collective experience in motion and dialogue. Shanthi works inward – using tactile, intimate forms to explore the body as a site of emotional and ancestral memory.
Michal works outward – mapping lived journeys, encounters, and shifting geography through her travelling scrolls.
Tunty Chauhan
Artist Note
‘I am a diary keeper. I carry a 10 metre paper scroll in which I make drawings wherever I live about who and what is going on and might contain life as experienced in cities, villages, fields, forests. I make drawings sitting in streets, cafes, schools, offices, refugee camps, train stations, trains, boats, beaches, planes, airports, buses, rickshaws, donkey carts…pretty much anywhere. My scrolls are not pristine documents but contain the marks and creases of life, carried as they have been over months and in many cases, years.
Drawing is an attentive language that people seem to trust. Perhaps they wonder what I am doing, as I sit on the street with a roll of paper. They approach to see what I sketch and if they want to be part of the unfolding story that I am making, so be it. This way of making and sharing my diary it is distinct to my painting practice and social, immersive, and empathic process.
I wish there was such a thing as a “storyteller passport” because I belong nowhere and everywhere. For the past 15 years I have often been tracing triangles between India, Pakistan, and Australia. I feel I belong to the story that wants to be told, to the event that wants to be witnessed, to the being who wants to be drawn, and remembered as a miniature painting in my scroll.’
Michal Glikson
“I think we carry within us our past, present-our lived experiences, inter-generational memories…..and when I sit with the material in my hands it gets transformed into these expressions which negates explanation. These in-turn inform me / direct me to the feelings I must have been holding on to in the recesses of the mind. It’s intuitive, meditative, healing, transformative and empowering too.”
Shanthi Swaroopini