Artist uses medical drawings to portray human mortality

Death is always a surprise, and a lie, according to artist Anju Dodiya who explores the fragile nature of the human body and the aspirations that keeps it going, in her new body of work.
Five years after her first solo in the city, the artist who lives in Mumbai has returned with "Imagined Immortals", a show that begins at the Vadehra Art Gallery here on January 18 and is set to coincide with the upcoming India Art Fair.
Considered one of the country's leading artists, Dodiya has turned into her cavas the printed pages of old medical illustration books, that she picked up from scrap markets.

"I have always been interested in the subject of mortality. We grant immortality to the beings we choose to remember - our mothers, our daughters, our heroines, our goddesses, our artists, our lovers...," Dodiya says.
In the process, she says "We forget our own mortal nature in the mundane cycles of giving and taking. Death is always a surprise, and a lie. Because we go on and on."
For the current exhibit, the artist has created a collage of mixed media works on pages of medical illustrations. These include a work Dodiya has titled "Witness" which depicts what seems like faded illustrations of cells and tissues with scaled down images of women or girls poring into their books. Another mixed media collage titled "Viridian Nights" shows a series of drawings based on the human eye.

"The collages forms only one part of my show. They are visually very interesting the language of the form very much drew me to these... The beauty of the cavity of the organs, of what lies inside us it is exiting," says Dodiya.

The artist, whose oeuvre has been inspired by a range of artists including poet Sylvia Plath, filmmaker Ingmar Bergman among others, acknowledges that the concept of death and dying has been an object of interest for people spanning different vocations and across timespans.
Dodiya, who is over 50 years old, refers to a recent book "Being Mortal" by US based Indian-origin surgeon Atul Gawande, which questions the role of modern medicine and has been termed "a meditation on living better with age related frailty."

"Gawande and others before him have written on the subject of death. As a human being the fear of death is always there. There is an amazing fascination with the living. As human beings there is such a rich life we are constantly striving to desire, to live, to be," Dodiya told PTI in an interview.