How does one make meaning of installations featuring human hair, hundreds of books piled in stacks, bindis, photographs, soundless video projections and hundreds of wooden beads on nails? The Seven Contemporaries publication based on the namesake exhibition, the final part of the three-fold exhibition, Difficult Loves, does just that, inviting the audience to experience the abstract artistic practices of seven female artists- Anita Dube, Bharti Kher, Dayanita Singh, Ranjani Shettar, Sheba Chhachhi, Sheela Gowda, Sonia Khurana- from the contemporary art scene. It seeks to capture their imagination, ingenuity, inspirations, anxieties, and musings, through their distinct and extraordinary art practices.

Belonging to two successive generations, the artists unpack their complex relationships between life and their selfhood. Through interviews, conversations and excerpts from their diaries which have been juxtaposed with their art, their colourful inner world becomes emergent.

Edited by KNMA’s Senior Curator, Akansha Rastogi and Director and Chief Curator, Roobina Karode, the volume features extensive essays by Parul Dave Mukherji, Gayatri Sinha, John Zarobell, and Marta Jakimowicz, along with Karode and Rastogi. Charting the journey of transformations, the publication attempts to delineate the artistic turn undertaken by these artists wherein they embraced video, text, performance, installation, found objects and commonplace materials to process difficult emotions and reveal anxious contours of the private self.

Edited: Akansha Rastogi and Roobina Karode
Publisher: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art
Pages: 199
ISBN: 978-8192803722