The Power of Poise and Radiance that is Redemption
- Georgina Maddox
- Feb 27
- 6 min read
by Georgina Maddox
The recent exhibition The Art of Fabulousness: In Praise of Presence, curated by Myna Mukherjee of Engendered, the transnational arts organization based in NY and New Delhi, explores the various shades of Fabulousness.
What really is Fabulousness? Is it only beauty and decorativeness or can it also be fierceness, knowledge and power? Putting these queries forward is the exhibition that accompanied the book launch of "The Art of Being Fabulous" by Shalini Passi. The two elements unfolded as a collaboration at The Leela, in New Delhi for one fabulous night.
“The exhibition redefines luxury as a cultivated relationship with material, meaning, and imagination. Fabulousness is framed not as excess, but as awareness, an ethic of depth, discipline, and discernment,” says Mukherjee, adding “the works privilege refinement over spectacle and continuity over trend. Materials carry memory and form becomes a moment for reflection. A quiet current of women’s self-affirmation runs through the exhibition, where radiance is understood as self-knowledge and poise as power.”
The exhibition featured works by Jenny TS, Noureen Rashid, Shiblee Muneer, Reshmi Dey, Moutushi Chakraborty, Santosh Jain, Piyali Sadhukan, Sonika Agarwal, Mariyam Firuzi, Babak Haghi, M Pravat, and Raghava KK.
The works in the exhibition are visually arresting and engage the viewer on a purely visual level, where one can admire the glasswork, the prints, the sculptural forms and the paintings. However as one spends time with these works a narrative unfolds. For instance, Moutushi Chakraborty’s Print Chronicle, a seven-feet-long paper scroll charts how prints travelled alongside empires, how it mediated faith and spread commerce, and even how it armed resistance. The horizontal scroll moves from the first press in Goa to Mughal ateliers, colonial lithographic workshops, bazaar prints, and the modernist turn under figures such as Raja Ravi Varma and Gaganendranath Tagore.
By invoking the scroll form, the work situates ‘fabulousness’ within a lineage of transmission. Printing democratized access to thought and fractured centralized authority, allowing ideas to circulate widely. This makes the print an element of fabulousness.
Next one engages with Jenny TS who approaches the identity of the tribes of the North-East, not as ethnic subjects but as a ‘sovereign presence’. Jenny draws from the iconography, ornamentation, and visual language of the North-East. She endows the work with an air of celebration and pride with no apologies. This is especially so since North-Eastern identity is often invisibilized and not treated as part of what is called Indian. She places tribal identity in the center rather than the periphery of the narrative, bringing to the fore the fabulousness of these identities re-drawing their map of representation.
Santosh Jain constructs visual palimpsests where fragments of Western classical painting intersect with Indian classical iconography. Her collages operate as temporal dialogues, collapsing centuries into a single frame, and suggesting that cultural memory is not linear, but collaborative and history is not fixed but continually annotated.
Piyali Sadhukhan presents an upturned tabut – a coffin, encircled by lush floral forms fashioned from broken glass bangles. At first glance, the work appears ornamental, almost celebratory. Yet the material cuts: bangles, symbols of marital identity, and domesticity are shattered and reassembled into a fragile halo around death.
Sadhukhan’s work elevates undervalued women’s labor into a site of resistance. Here the overturned coffin becomes both memorial and indictment: a refusal to aestheticize violence, even as it transforms trauma into testimony. Within the exhibition’s meditation on Art of Fabulousness, her work reframes adornment as defiance. Beauty here is not decorative excess, but a resilient surface through which grief, memory, and suppressed histories are made legible, asking us, in fact insisting, that we look again.
M Pravat is a Kolkata-born, New Delhi-based contemporary artist. He is known for exploring architectural forms, urban landscapes, and construction materials through painting, installation, and sculpture. His work often uses mixed media, cement, and marble dust, to investigate the fractured nature of city-spaces, memory, and structural decay.
In this exhibition his ‘stacks’ of column sculptures transform architecture into a metaphor. Neo-miniatures reclaim the discipline of miniature painting to question the authority of images, for memory and becoming. Built from fragments and traces, these forms read like layered manuscripts, each level a residue of habitation, each surface marked by transition.
Maryam Firuzi is an acclaimed Iranian multimedia artist and photographer based in Tehran. She is known for blending staged photography, literature, and cinema to explore themes of identity, memory, and womanhood in Iran. In this exhibition she discovers the self through a staged photograph of a woman (herself) reading a book seated on a street that is a chaos of the comic-tragic ongoings of everyday life. The act of reading is private, and yet she makes it a public and political one, by situating herself in that very unrelenting environment.
“The act of reading becomes a reclamation of the street as a site of contemplation and collective memory, an invitation to slow down, to perceive, to relate,” observes Mukherjee.
Artist Raghava KK is inspired by the eighteenth-century automaton created for Tipu Sultan, in which a tiger mauls a near life-sized European soldier. A carved toy-like sculpture made of wood and brass is what Raghava uses to reorients the drama of conquest into a meditation on interior conflict. Rather than staging empire against empire, his carved tiger turns upon itself. This is not a spectacle of domination, but a confrontation within. An interactive element is added to the work, that when you play with it and pull its tongue it lets out a sound. Mukherjee contemplates that the gesture of stroking the tongue is intimate, almost devotional. She further states that the work proposes that true power lies not in defeating the other, but in listening to the discord within and finding one’s own note of equilibrium.
A work by artists Rochelle Nembhard and Gemma Shepherd is a Digital Animated NFT and Digital Photograph titled Genesis explores the age-old relationship between women and earth. The collaborative series emerged from a shared reckoning with land, trauma, and inherited strength in South Africa. Positioning the female body within ancient stone circles, mountains, and sacred terrains, Nembhard and Shepherd invoke rock as both symbol and substance, grounding yet transformable, resilient yet breakable.
Digital photograph by Rochelle Nembhard and Gemma Shepherd
Reshmi Dey’s Molten Tapestry reimagines weaving through the language of glass. Composed of hundreds of hand-pulled canes drawn in dialogue with flame and gravity, the work translates the ritual of loom and textile into molten matter. Each filament bears the trace of breath and gesture, embedding process within form.
Another work by Dey is a collaborative installation, where Dey works with a Swedish artist, Philip Swede Hickok. Together they employ the European grille- glass technique, traditionally associated with refined decorative craft, to embed the faces of South Asians across geographies, classes, and castes. They create visibility that is both fractured and luminous, within these layers of carved and acid-etched glass.
Red Fish by Babak Haghi
In Red Fish, a digital animated NFT, Babak Haghi explores the body as a language of identity and resistance. The photograph captures the tension between restriction and vitality: the red fish, a Persian New Year symbol, confined in a glass jar, mirrors the containment of dance and expression under societal constraints in Iran. In the context of the exhibition the work situates glamour as resilience and poise as strength.
Finally, one is provoked by Sonika Agarwal’s work from the series “What Remains Awake”. This trio of works explores desire, emergence, and the transformative potential of presence. Vasana The Architecture of Desire presents desire as a living structure, rooted in thought, memory, and instinct. Its brain-like wooden form with honeycombed cavities visualizes accumulation, persistence, and the tension between natural impulse and constructed consciousness. The other two works are light which responds to touch and The Womb of Radiance is a glass light installation evoking origin, gestation, and inner illumination.
The exhibition leaves one with much to contemplate and it is just a matter of time before one explores deeper the idea of Fabulousness through the book.
(The images of the artworks are courtesy of Engendered.)
Georgina Maddox is an independent critic-curator with almost two decades of experience in the field of Indian art and culture. She was assistant editor at India Today’s Mail Today and senior arts writer for the Indian Express and the Times of India. She is currently working in the media as an independent critic for various publications and has published articles in Open Magazine, India Today, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and also in Elle Magazine, The Hindu and Business Line, Sunday Magazine BLINK, TAKE on Art, Time Out, and online with US based E-magazine, Studio International, STIR world and MASH Mag.
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