The fourth exhibition in the Mycelial Legacies project sets itself up at the site of its origin, following on from its startup support and encouragement from Anant Art Gallery in 2022/23, and brings together paintings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs, installations and videos by 20 artists. All artists in the project have affiliations to the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Vadodara - an institution that has been one of the wellsprings of contemporary Indian art practice. In doing so the exhibition seeks to continue to codify the contribution of women artists to the development of the Faculty, and to the shaping of its broader influences, and extend an institutional legacy.
What is the nature of this legacy? It is networked, intergenerational, nourishing and insurgent. The alumni network of the Faculty is widespread, a ‘pioneer impulse’ of graduates which kept the institution ‘liberal’ and ‘cosmopolitan’. The Baroda School, a term loosely coined, has been identified by art making levered to a deep knowledge of art history, in an understanding that rigorous practice and a conceptual framework rooted in the visible and everyday, represented from the vantage of a ‘radical subject position’, as defined by Shivaji Panikkar, are the hallmarks of its artistic pluralism.
In a time when as a society we are on the one hand beginning to revel in the freedom of non-binary identifications and on the other witnessing sites inhabited by women as those of critical resistance, this exhibition looks over 2 decades of innovative and interconnected artistic production by women artists. Neither thematically nor chronologically presented, the works by artists who completed their studies from the institution in the new millennium, highlight key characteristics of the Baroda School - the primacy of subjective perception, material experimentation, interdisciplinary practice, enthusiasm for the living arts and an emphasised relationship between body and space. Within these broad themes the exhibition explores notions of locational and gender identities and evolution of peripatetic, materially curious artistic practice with a resurgence of a focus on the work and its formal and aesthetic treatment.