Tale of Mahua: Let Me Immerse into You is an experimental banner painting that is part of the banner painting series. This project explores the artist’s inhabiting cultural-in-between space by incorporating the Bengal folk aesthetics, native materials with traditions, and her diasporic experiences.
The series of banner paintings contains mixed-media painting, hand-stitch, and Saree on unstarched canvas. The approach to presenting the painting as banners is to tap into the artist’s liminal space and make it visible. Banner is a common form of activism, protest, and manifestation regardless of country or culture. Also, banners reflect the notion of floating around, moving and travelling rather than being fixed to a place, location or time, which the artist finds her connection of uprootedness and displacement.
As an immigrant and woman of colour, her ethnicity and identity have often been questioned. Hence, this became the formative part of her creative research. This banner painting series thus actively interrogates her identity and the ongoing process of her cultural in-between through disparate material practice.