In Focus: Supporting artists, extending art practices
In 2024, we instituted a new platform to support two women artists under 'In Focus: supporting artists, extending art practices,' initiated with the support of Vanu Chemicals Pvt Ltd and PowerSpack Industries Pvt Ltd. Through the 'In Focus' platform, we are keen to highlight artistic practices that are deeply rooted in community engagement, intersectional thinking, and material exploration.
The platform seeks to nurture sustained artistic inquiry, enabling practitioners to expand the scope of their work and deepen its resonance within and beyond their immediate contexts.
In this edition, we supported the work of Moumita Basak and Shweta Bhattad—two women artists whose practices delve into questions of gender, labour, and rural life through long-durational, collaborative processes.
The Recipients
Shweta Bhattad
On Being Foragers…
A collaborative project with Gram Art Project, Paradsinga, Madhya Pradesh
Shweta Bhattad’s work in and around Paradsinga village, Madhya Pradesh, brings together artists, farmers, women, youth, and volunteers through collective action, organised as the Gram Art Project. Her practice intersects art and agriculture to build awareness around organic farming, sustainability, and land-based knowledge. In this project, Shweta will focus on 'foraging in the forest' as a way of becoming attuned and receptive to what the forest holds and the life it offers. It will be a collaborative process of working with rural women and other communities like the Dhimar community who have a deep relationship with the forest to work collectively for conservation and production. Together they will collect and circulate stories that reimagine a future for our species, one that allows foraging and rewilding as a way of life.
Shweta Bhattad is a visual artist and performer. She is a trained sculptor, having completed her BFA in Nagpur, and MVA in MS University of Baroda. She has worked across mediums in the past, with a strong focus on issues of women’s safety, education and the female body and is the founder-member of the Gram Art Project.
Gram Art Project understands the need for community, of how a communal sharing of knowledge unlocks puzzles, makes collaborations possible and enables a certain kind of self-sufficiency which is not possible through solely individual action. A self-sufficiency for which food is necessarily at the center of and so, alongside organic farming and no-tilling farming they are doing to form a more intrinsic, sustainable relationship with their environment, with the land, they have also expanded into foraging, which they began by going on walks with experienced foragers from the Dhimar community to nearby forests.
Moumita Basak
The layers of rural self-stories
A collaborative art project with girls and young women in Srirampur, Bardhaman, West Bengal
Moumita Basak’s project centres the lived experiences of girls and women from the marginalised weaver community in rural Bengal. Engaging with them as both subjects and collaborators, the project explores how gendered expectations—shaped by social customs, familial pressure, and notions of “respectability”—impact access to education, health, and autonomy. Drawing from oral histories, textile craft, and local knowledge systems, it creates a platform for dialogue across communities, including daily wage workers, artisans, tutors, and Panchayat Mahila Groups, to address issues like dowry, early marriage, and social invisibility. Through this collaborative approach, the project seeks to amplify silenced voices and foster pathways toward social justice and transformation.
Moumita Basak is a community oriented, textile-based artist who earned her BFA (2020) and MFA (2022) in Painting from Govt. College of Art and Craft, Calcutta University. Her practice focuses on the everyday lives, memories, and experiences of women, examining how markers of masculinity and femininity intersect with overlapping discourses on ecology and sustainability, particularly in her native Bengal. As an eco-feminist artist, her artistic themes, rooted in the socio-cultural fabric of Bengal, also address issues of civil rights and experiences from marginalized gender, caste, and working-class communities. Exploring questions of identity, belonging, and cultural heritage, her practice seeks to locate sustainable materials as a site of contemporary experimentation and revitalization.
Her works have been shown at several exhibitions of which the recent are the 'A Relay of Reciprocity' at Khoj, Delhi, (2025) 'The Origin Story' at IILM Centre of Arts and Ideas, Delhi, (2024) 'The -woven path' at space118, Mumbai, (2024), Online show at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, (2024), Hold the dandelions, there is no one to be found' at Gallery 27, Kochi, (2024), 'hawa mein baat' at Nand Nagri community hall, Delhi (2024), 'lateral B(1)inds' at Stir, Delhi (2024) Barbil Art Project 'KATA SAREI' at Barbil, Odisha (2023), 17th International Triennial of Tapestry in Lodz, Poland (2022), Kochi Students Biennale (2021). She has participated in residencies including Arthshila X Khoj (2023), IMMERSE, Mumbai (2022-23), KHOJ Peers, Delhi (2022), and Emami Arts Program, Kolkata (2021). She lives and works in Burdwan, West-Bengal, India.