Towards gender-neutral world

The All-India Women Artists’ Contemporary Art Exhibition, 2019 is an honest attempt by Artscapes to make the world a better place for its inhabitants. This event which is entering its 8th edition this year, invites women from across the country to participate and contribute their share in art and culture. 

“There is an inherent inequality and bias embedded in the language that we use in common as well as academic discourse, where there is a conscious emphasis on the gender of the creator when referring to women who write, sing, paint, or run for political office as specifically ‘women writers, ‘women singer’, ‘women painters’, and ‘women politicians’,” says art critic Prof Seema Bawa. 

“On the contrary, exhibition of works of male artists are only mentioned as ‘artists’ without emphasising the gender,” she adds. 

The creative works at the Museum of Fine Arts, Panjab University, manifested the visions of women from different walks of life which touched every subject possible from animals to people, from village to city from greenery to monochrome, from shades to light and so on and so forth. There are paintings like Kiran Kumari’s My Village, Swati Vishwanath Sabale’s Aung San Su Kyi ( Rohingya), Swati Mukherjee’s Shadow, and Kavita Singh’s Parrots on the Cactus.

The awards with a cash prize were given under professional category and student category. Some of the recipients of the awards are  Kavita Mehrotra (Exist of Life), Neha Jaiswal (Companion), Preeti Dhaniya (Bounded Precious Time) under professional category and  Aarti Maurya, Reetu , Agomoni Sen and Priya Sisodiya for the student category.