Bhasha Chakrabarti presents ‘Oceanic Feelings’, part of a new and ongoing series titled ‘The Ship as Co-Conspirator (to capitalism and to its undoing)’, which is based off of a series of visits that Chakrabarti has done to the shipbreaking yards across South Asia, where over 85% of the world’s ships are broken down and recycled. While there are ships of all kinds dealt with here, a large number of them are immense container ships which ferry the world’s commodities across the seas. Oceanic Feelings is a triptych of embroidered and needle-felted works, done on used and discarded clothing based on the eroded and barnacled surfaces of these mammoth vessels, which have reached the end of their lives. The embroidered pieces are set within brass portholes which she has collected from the shipyards themselves, and they were, of course, taken from the bodies of these same vessels. Rather than looking out into a distance, when one looks into these windows, one is faced with a tactile surface and immediate reality. It’s a reality that forces us to reckon with the violence of mass consumption and the inherent impossibility as well as unsustainability of the systems that are there to support globalised capitalism, even under promises of recycling.

Bhasha Chakrabarti has been based in Honolulu, New Delhi, New York, and now New Haven. She is interested in exploring how artwork, even when grounded in local materials and symbols, can speak to issues beyond the local by situating her practice within global conversations around race, gender, and power. By crossing many genres, she explores art-making as a mode of discourse and her work generates dialogues between subaltern tropes and feminine forms of labor from the global South and the agendas of resistance movements of marginalized communities in the global North.

Bhasha Chakrabarti (b. 1991, Honolulu, HI) graduated with an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in the Spring of 2022. The artist has exhibited in solo and group shows at Experimenter (Kolkata and Mumbai), Jeffery Deitch (New York & Los Angeles), Hales (New York), M+B (Los Angeles), Museum of Art and Photography (Bangalore) and Lyles & King (New York). Chakrabarti is the recipient of the South Asia Artist Prize (SAAI) awarded by University of California, Berkeley. She was a semi-finalist in the Smithsonian’s 2022 Outwin-Boochever Portrait Competition and was awarded a Beinecke Research Fellowship in 2021 and the Fountainhead Residency in 2020. Her works have been written about in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and The Art Newspaper. Bhasha Chakrabarti currently lives and works in New Haven, CT.