MUMBAI.- Home is wherever you are marks Rekha Rodwittiya's 20th solo with Sakshi Gallery. Spread across two floors and spanning oil on canvas, embroidery, carpets, photography, and watercolours, the exhibition brings together a wide-ranging body of work that reflects the artist's sustained engagement with memory, lived experience, history and the narratives of women. Also presented for the first time is a series of photographs taken by Rodwittiya in 1978, while studying under the tutelage of Professor Jyoti Bhatt.
Rodwittiya's densely layered compositions often create spaces in which personal and collective histories intersect. As the artist observes, “My area of focus resembles a garden—a tiny plot of land that I continually cultivate, till, plow, and harvest.” This process of accumulation and reconfiguration is evident in the ongoing series Home is wherever you are. Here, photographs taken by the artist are meticulously arranged into densely configured tableaux before being over-painted in watercolour. The painted surface simultaneously reveals, alters and obscures the photographic image beneath it. Through this process of layering, rearticulation and erasure, the works consider the ways in which histories are constructed, altered and selectively remembered.
A sustained engagement with the lives and narratives of women has remained central to Rodwittiya's practice. Her work considers the individual within larger structures of geography, politics, gender and social hierarchy, while foregrounding the complexity of lived experience. As she writes, “The politics of a region, the geography of a space, and the hierarchies of existence that give rise to oppressions and suppression, all in relation to how women are positioned within these contexts, serve as the trigger for me to discover meaningful content and purpose within my work.”
The exhibition remains on view until November 15, 2026.
Rekha Rodwittiya is an artist, independent curator, writer, and teacher having around 40 years of experience in the field of art. She has established a strong, politically vigilant feminist practice that sanctioned her representation of the female figure in a non-voyeuristic manner. The stories of women, valiant in their courage to overcome the oppression of patriarchy, are potent imprints of significance for her, and etch powerful legacies that she chooses to emulate and imbibe from.
Rodwittiya states, “It is these many stories of feminist endeavor within which I have been cradled, that shapes my perception to negotiate a journey of living that places my energies to conjoin with these ancestries of determination and courage.”
She has had 39 solo exhibitions across the world, and has been presented nationally and internationally in over 130 group exhibitions, 24 art fairs and numerous residencies and site-specific projects. She has been actively involved in art teaching through alternative non-institutionalized methods, as well as being a guest faculty at art colleges in India and abroad; and is the founder and CEO of The Collective Studio Baroda. She is vocal within the space of feminist discourse, and a champion of women's empowerment and equal rights.
