As you enter the NSIC Exhibition Grounds in New Delhi for the four-day India Art Fair, a large installation immediately catches the eye. Created on a quilt, the work by artist Judy Chicago poses a pointed question: ‘What If Women Ruled the World?’ The participatory project invites visitors to respond, weaving together global voices that have been “digitally threaded” to create the artwork.
While Chicago’s question is overtly political, the artistic conversations become more personal and intimate once you enter the booths. Here, the female form and beauty standards, sacrifice and violence, familial responsibilities, and female goddesses assume the spotlight.
Here, the personal and the political merge, echoing long-standing feminist concerns.
Bodies, scaled differently
In her artwork—‘This Is the Least I Could Shrink’—artist Natasha Sachdeva showcases a woman struggling to force a red bangle onto her foot, an act that remains unfinished.
The work invites viewers to confront their own relationship with the body, posing unsettling questions: “Would you exchange your body for a better one? Does your body feel like baggage? Have you ever been triggered by your own body?”
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Drawn from personal experience, Sachdeva traces the work back to her teenage years, when she was diagnosed with PCOD and experienced sudden weight gain. “Bullying made me question my own body,” she says, adding that she was too young then to understand the beauty standards. That struggle continues. “I’m still trying to develop a loving relationship with my body,” she reflects. “It’s still an unpleasant relationship.”
The piece builds on her long-standing engagement with the female body through self-portraits and depictions of elderly women, particularly the ways in which desire is suppressed over time.
While Sachdeva makes her woman shrink, ace sculptor Ravinder Reddy expands the female form into something monumental. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his brightly painted, gilded fibreglass head sculptures. With golden skin, crimson lips, and bulging eyes, Reddy’s women are unmistakably theatrical, drawing from the visual language of classical ‘devis’ (goddesses) while resisting easy reverence. Incidentally, one of his most celebrated works is titled ‘Devi’.
Though rooted in female anatomy, the sensuality here is restrained. What eventually stands out is the unwavering gaze, piercing and assuming a monumental space of its own.
Speaking of devi, mythology and religion have long turned to female figures—goddesses, or otherwise—to give form to the experience of being a woman.
The many devis
Rooted in her own experience of a gruelling six-hour surgery, after which she asked to see the knees removed from her body, Jayasri Burman created ‘I, Dharitri’. In Sanskrit, Dharitri means the Earth, symbolising stability, strength, and fertility.
The excruciating pain led Burman to the story of Sati, who died in her father Daksha’s sacrificial fire but did not burn. “Maddened with grief, Shiva danced holding her, and Vishnu cut her body into 51 parts, which fell across the subcontinent, sanctifying the land as Shakti Peethas. For the artist, the severed body and the flow of blood became the provocation. Was there no other way to honour Sati except through her dismemberment?” Sinha writes.
“The sweeping flow of red, like the manic manifestation of Raktabeej, spread unevenly through the topography of breasts and limbs, universalising the sacrifice of women. The Earth and her body parts contoured the landscape. As an embedded emblem of faith, how many satis did it take to make such a blood-drenched landscape?” she adds.
Meanwhile, Bangladeshi visual artist Ashfika Rahman turns to Bon Bibi, a guardian deity revered by both Hindus and Muslims in the Sundarbans of India and Bangladesh.
While doing so, she makes a larger point, archiving the identities of Hindus and Muslims killed in religious brutality in both countries over the past 50 years.
The artwork takes the form of a flower that grows in the Bon Bibi temple grounds. Relatives and close friends of the victims embroider their names onto what resembles a blooming bell.
Another work, a monumental sculpture by Natasha Preenja, depicts a crouching figure of Lajja Gauri, an ancient goddess of fertility whose squatting posture is closely associated with birth and domestic rituals.
“The sculpture draws from the figure of Lajja Gauri, an ancient embodiment of fertility whose grounded, squatting posture is intimately tied to birth, reproductive cycles, and domestic ritual,” says Preenja. “Squatting is also a way of protesting to claim the space. When you protest and sit,” she adds.
Meanwhile, responses to Chicago’s ‘What If Women Ruled the World?’ also assume personal spaces. “I believe that vulnerability should be allowed by both genders, to show that we can all be with each other,” read one. “There would be a lot more compassion. I would love to see that world,” read another.
