Bindu Mehra
About The Artist :
My art practise is centered upon my research with notions of identity, memory, history and hybridity.
Immersion in North American culture and dislocation from my native Indian culture has had a profound
impact on my aesthetics. My work represents and is informed by my hybrid identity trapped in the
continuum of cross-cultural negotiation and formed through personal and cultural experiences. It
combines both conscious and unconscious influences and incorporates symbols and motifs that reference
elements of East and West. I merge materials and philosophy associated with my Indian heritage with
western notions of abstraction and aesthetics. I feel compelled to traverse the terrain between the
traditional and the contemporary, between East and West.
Bio - Data :
Bindu Mehra is a Canadian artist of Indian origin and is currently living in Toronto. Bindu a recipient of
numerous Ontario Arts Council grants has been exhibiting nationally and internationally in Europe, Asia
and North America and has recently completed her artist residency at the Vermont Studio Centre in the
United States and Sandarbh Artist Residency in India. She has also been short listed for an exhibition at
TateBritain, London, UK and has exhibited at Scope Art Fair, Lincoln Centre - US, Alwan for the Arts- US,
Blackburn Museum- UK, South Hill Park Arts Centre- UK, Chiang Mai Museum- Thailand, Lakeeren Art
Gallery - India to name a few. Bindu was also invited by the French Consulate as an artist in Residence
to Paris and to participate in Bonjour India, French Cultural Festival in India.
Fariba Salma Alam
Narrative Biography
Fariba S. Alam is a visual artist who lives and works in New York. She received her B.A. from Columbia
University (1998) and is the recipient of a photography Fulbright fellowship (1998/1999.) She earned her
M.A. from New York University (2004) and was selected for Aljira EMERGE (2008.) Her work has been
exhibited at The Queens Museum, MOCADA/Museum of African Art, MOCA/Shanghai
among others; collections include the Burger Collection and FondazioneCassa di Risparmio.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I collapse a broad spectrum of the photographic tradition—from black & white to digital, from anthropological
to personal—to give history the immediacy of the present, and to establish the notion of identity as an
undulating continuum. The visuality and indexicality of photography within the colonial and postcolonial
imagination, particularly in the Indian subcontinent since the 1840s, are a departure point. I mine my
family’s archival photographs in order to weave in my personal history.
Religious and secular allegories—with themes of migration, travel and fantasy—often inhabit my narrative
influences. For example, several of my works reference the parable of the Night Journey or Mir’aj, in which
the prophet Mohammed takes a mystical voyage from Mecca to Jerusalem riding a creature half-angel,
half-horse. I am interested in investigating the fluidity between the intangible and real, the tension between
spiritual transcendence and corporeal immanence, while space and direction are rendered ambiguous.
I draw from a broad range of visual influences, including mathematical diagrams, calligraphy, scientific
patterns and architectural blueprints. I am particularly drawn to the dualityof mysticism and hard science
that resides in the idea that life unfolds in defined and continuous patterns.
I also explore Islamic and minimalist techniques of serial repetition to construct a site of transition that is at
once grounded and yet, likemystical Sufi states, propelled by constant movement and flux. Symmetry
becomes an anchor in both my process and my visuallanguage, as does the notion of the body as territory
or vessel in spiritual anderotic yearnings. Finally, I use similar-sized, repeating tilesto concretize the Islamic
and architectural references in my pieces, as well as patterning and geometry in reductive art.
