Bhasha Chakrabarti

Bhasha Chakrabarti (b. 1991) has been based in Honolulu, New Delhi, New York, and now New Haven. Bhasha  engages with the way that cloth simultaneously covers and reveals. The physical proximity of cloth to the human body, both when being used and when being produced, gives it the unique ability to hold the complexity of subjectivities and labor. Thus, she uses textiles in multiple and synchronous forms: as a support and a subject matter in painting, as a wrapping and a surrogate for skin, and as a material manifestation of and a metaphorical container for human entanglements throughout histories of oppression and liberation. The centering of cloth in Bhasha's work, is the centering of embodied touch, both violent and erotic; gesturing to the actuality of ruptures in society, as well as the possibilities of mending, patching, and being quilted together in radically new ways. The body is implicitly present in cloth and it is often explicitly present in the imagery of Bhasha's paintings.  This, along with her choice to lean into the richness of non-Western textile traditions, becomes a unique way of resisting colonial and capitalist systems that deny the existence of black and brown bodies as sites of pleasure, knowledge, and value.