Kriti Arora

What is an Indian artist?

"India is a land of terrible complexities. There is this huge diaspora of poverty and sometimes one feels one is going to get subsumed by it. Then, there is this constant circus of political corruption and all the connotations that it evokes. India has seen a resurgence in religiosity and terrorism followed by the sharp rise of militancy in Kashmir which continues to this day. Conflicts tend to be so invasive as to be numbing. How can I allow the epiphanies of my art to flower in all this confusion? An artist has to decide just how much space he wants to give to all this conflict in his art. I realized very young that I could no escape it. I therefore chose to depict it as a way of ensuring that I was not subsumed completely by it."

Extract from Made by Indians, ed. Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris, 2007