French artist Olympe Ramakrishna’s exhibition in Thiruvananthapuram celebrates Malayali women away from home

Discover Olympe Ramakrishna's exhibition celebrating Malayali women's strength and identity through art at Alliance Française de Trivandrum.

A six-metre-long traditional white cotton Kerala sari hangs on the walls of the Alliance Française de Trivandrum art gallery. Printed on the fabric is a painting inspired by the French painter Paul Gauguin, showing lush green landscapes and uneven terrain. The artwork features portraits of six Malayali women and is part of the Voices of the Western Coast exhibition by French artist Olympe Ramakrishna.

Olympe explains that the painting is a tribute to women and their inner strength. Her work celebrates the lives of three mother-daughter pairs: Oliviya-Siya, Sreedevi-Aditi, and Ann-Seena. She represents them in a stylised and simple way, with each face acting as a bridge between past and present, origin and displacement, intimacy and shared memory, as Olympe says.

The printed sari displayed at the exhibition | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

“Through my practice, I try to understand the identity of today’s women from different regions and translate it through my artistic language,” she says. “I do this by exploring the individual stories of these women, while finding what is common about them.”

Olympe spoke to around 20 women from Kerala living in Bengaluru, from different walks of life, before working on the project. She asked them how it felt to be a woman from Kerala. “I was trying to understand what was common in all their answers. Their responses included things like food, movies, clothing and so on,” says Olympe. “They also had a strong connection with nature and had some childhood memories associated with the State,” she explains, utilising it as a backdrop that unifies the women in the painting.

“For some, Kerala is the place of birth; for others, it is a land of holidays, ancestral homes, and recurring returns. Many grew up elsewhere, yet spent their childhood summers running through grandparents’ houses, tasting ripe mangoes, or observing the slow rhythm of village life,” says the artist, pointing out that these memories are intensified by distance.