Artist Shruti Mahajan’s abstractions on home, spaces and the city

Hyderabad-based artist Shruti Mahajan’s new series, Between Brackets, touches upon conservation architecture and changing spaces in cities

Artist Shruti Mahajan has lived in different cities in India — Mumbai, Maheshwar, Baramulla, Sri Ganganagar and Secunderabad. Her idea of home is fragmented, transient and a recurring theme in her art. Her new series titled Between Brackets, showcased by Shrine Art Gallery on Art in Touch (artintouch.in), extends her artistic discussion on cities and dwellings. Shruti explains that the series, while referring to how brackets hold together architectural structures, is also a metaphor for her love for language: “What is said between brackets or parentheses adds value to a sentence. Similarly, I like my art to have subtexts.”

Between Brackets also draws from two of her earlier series — Spatial Dialogues and Continuity of Construction, in its focus on spaces and heritage of a city. For Spatial Dialogues (2021), she had collaborated with conservation architect Ravindra Gundu Rao whom she had known since her student days at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Rao was involved in the conservation of Maheshwar’s Ahilya Fort, which is now a heritage hotel. 

When Shruti was working on her graduation project in 2003, she had stayed at Ahilya. There, she observed the heritage architecture of Maheshwar and the weavers of Sally Holkar’s Rehwa Society working on their looms on the banks of Narmada. The flight of stairs from the river to the fort, for instance, was the subject of one of her recent artworks. Shruti is also a trained textile designer and fascinated by the warp and weft; she included sketches of the looms.