When forced silence breaks out
There is a quiet ache in being unseen, a feeling Aashima Mehrotra tackles head on in Vanchana Ek Vritaant, currently running at New Delhi’s India Habitat Centre. Society often ignores its true talents, leaving gifted creators with zero stage left to stand on and forcing a silence on masters of their craft. Mehrotra channels this exact sense of cultural and personal loss, but refuses to let the narrative end in despair.
Working with encaustic painting is stubbornly difficult. Heating beeswax and pigment requires intense patience, yet she handles it beautifully, sealing raw emotion into thick, tactile layers. Her central figure is a woman carrying the heavy weight of social exclusion. But rather than breaking under the pressure, this protagonist hardens into a symbol of fierce endurance.
UNMAAD surrounds you in deep crimson. It is the messy, fevered feeling of desire, where ecstasy and unrest tangle together. Then you move to STEPS TOWARDS FUTURE and everything changes. There is something Christopher Moore said about how kids see magic because they look for it, and that is what this acrylic piece does. It is stubborn about its optimism, wide eyed and real.
The thematic range pushes even further. Desires maps out the chaotic intersection of personal ambition and societal expectations. Meanwhile, Banaras and Circus 2 take you somewhere else entirely. Through the alleys of memory and imagination, she has turned everyday moments into stories that stick with you. Doing all this while working a demanding government job is serious work. Her work forces you to confront what you’ve been overlooking. The exhibition’s on until June 15th. It works on you in a way that goes beyond the paintings themselves. There is something in here about loss and how it can open you up to something new.
