Sid Pattni
Skin like water soaked wood (Part V), 2025
Oil on canvas
36 x 30 in
91.4 x 76.2 cm
91.4 x 76.2 cm
Copyright The Artist
These works extend my ongoing exploration into the afterlives of empire and the complex visual codes through which identity, particularly Indian identity, has been constructed, distorted, and internalised. In this...
These works extend my ongoing exploration into the afterlives of empire and the complex visual codes through which identity, particularly Indian identity, has been constructed, distorted, and internalised.
In this series, I introduce the figures of colonial-era women, sourced from traditional portraiture of the time. These images were often crafted not to reflect the individuality of their subjects, but to serve the ideological machinery of empire. The women function as symbols of civility, obedience, domestic power, or racial purity. Their presence in the colonial archive is less about who they were, and more about what they were made to represent.The work interrogates the conditions of their image-making and how gender, like race, was constructed and codified through the aesthetics of empire. Their inclusion complicates the binary between coloniser and colonised and extends my broader inquiry into how identity is formed through visual and symbolic systems of power
In this series, I introduce the figures of colonial-era women, sourced from traditional portraiture of the time. These images were often crafted not to reflect the individuality of their subjects, but to serve the ideological machinery of empire. The women function as symbols of civility, obedience, domestic power, or racial purity. Their presence in the colonial archive is less about who they were, and more about what they were made to represent.The work interrogates the conditions of their image-making and how gender, like race, was constructed and codified through the aesthetics of empire. Their inclusion complicates the binary between coloniser and colonised and extends my broader inquiry into how identity is formed through visual and symbolic systems of power
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