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The Hindu
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Jyoti Bhatt and the art of civic memory
At 91, Jyoti Bhatt still works from his Baroda studio, engrossed in painting, analogue photography and printmaking. The studio is quiet but alive, filled with etched plates, photographic prints, and the gentle persistence of a lifelong practice. For over a month, Through the Line and the Lens, a landmark retrospective curated by contemporary artist and his student Rekha Rodwittiya (first at Bikaner House and now on exhibit at Latitude 28), has offered more than a tribute to the modernist who has a storied history as an artist and a teacher. Featuring decades of work, the exhibition, the largest to date, is a reminder to us that art holds our rituals, resistances, and everyday textures as forms of remembering. And that Bhatt has spent a lifetime recording them. Knowing the artist Bhatt's influence runs deep — in how we see pattern, archive the everyday, and build art education in India. He did this not through grand proclamations, but by treating the ordinary as worthy of artistic inquiry. His photographic documentation of rural Indian culture saved for posterity motifs, mural fragments, and the lives of craftspeople with the same care afforded to fine art. Born in 1934, he came of age with the nation, studied in Baroda, trained in Naples and New York, and returned to shape a distinctly Indian visual grammar. 'I didn't set out to make overt political or social statements, but having grown up in a constantly shifting socio-cultural landscape, those experiences naturally seeped into my visual language,' explains Bhatt over email. As a founding figure of the Baroda School, he wasn't just an artist — he was an institution-builder, whose teaching and practice gave form to how generations would learn, make, and see. This meant designing curricula that integrated Indian aesthetics with global techniques, encouraging interdisciplinary work, and mentoring students to develop their own voices, including Rodwittiya. Discrediting systems of elitism When painting dominated modernist imagination, Bhatt turned to printmaking, then considered minor, and made it affordable, replicable, and subversive. Later, he took to photography with the same care. Hespent years building a visual archive — not just of his own work, but of his peers and the communities he admired — quietly preserving traditions that were at risk of vanishing. 'Printmaking and photography enabled me to bridge aesthetics with accessibility,' he says. Both mediums became ways of remembering. 'Today, with digital technologies, these mediums continue to serve as powerful, democratic tools — challenging hierarchies and expanding the boundaries of contemporary Indian art,' he adds. For Bhatt, art and pedagogy were inseparable. At M.S. University, Baroda, he helped shape not just artists but an entire ecosystem of making, thinking, and documenting. He had a long and formative career as a teacher — building institutions through critical dialogue, collective workshops, and a refusal to isolate art from its social and material contexts. His legacy lives in the questions he posed, the tools he passed on, such as techniques in intaglio printmaking, field-based research, and ways of visually coding memory through symbolic motifs. 'I found myself documenting my friends and family, my travels and daily meetings, fine art fairs, exhibitions. Ultimately, photography turned out to be a tool for me to observe and preserve the vanishing rural artistic traditions in the face of modernity. I believe personal identity creates collective memory, which comes out most vividly in self-reflective forms of conversation.'Jyoti BhattArtist Graphic prints and politics Bhatt's brilliance lies in giving symbolic detail real weight. He doesn't just document folk motifs, he enters into conversation with them. He renders them with humour, sharpness, and sometimes irony. In one print, a goddess stands beside a consumer logo; in another, a parrot speaks with near-human mischief. 'In the graphic prints we see how Bhatt often uses subversive inflections as a means by which he positions his politics, and the critique he has of establishments that he views as retrogressive to the ideals of pluralism and liberal thinking,' says Rodwittiya. She sees this not as polemic, but as quiet dissent — delivered through linework, wit, and deeply embedded references. 'This exhibition marks a significant milestone in both scale and substance. [But] what makes it truly special is the personal investment behind it. I have been collecting Jyoti Bhatt's printmaking works over the years with deep admiration and intent. Aside from a few early pieces loaned from private collections and the artist's own archive of photographs, nearly 75% of the works on view belong to Latitude 28. This makes the exhibition not only a tribute to one of India's most important modern artists, but also a reflection of a long-standing commitment to his legacy.'Bhavna KakarFounder-Director, Latitude 28 Why he matters Through his work and teaching, Bhatt reminds us that institutions matter — as ecosystems of exchange, care, and critique. In a time when the formal study of art is undervalued, and pedagogy reduced to metrics, his life's work is a blueprint for what thoughtful, long-view cultural stewardship can look like. For instance, his collaborative efforts to bring rural and urban practices into the same academic frame helped dismantle narrow hierarchies of knowledge. Bhatt's prints are more than ink on paper — they are maps of how a country might come to know itself. 'Through the Line and the Lens' is on till May 25 at Latitude 28. The essayist and educator writes on design and culture.
India Today
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
Jyoti Bhatt retrospective
At 91, Jyoti Bhatt looks at showcases of his works as a means to hold on to a fast-fading memory; memory that's been slipping away like sand. The ongoing retrospective titled 'Jyoti Bhatt: Through the Line and the Lens' by Latitude 28 in Delhi (on till May 25), and curated by artist Rekha Rodwittiya, puts on display the artist's complete collection from Bhavna Kakar's printmaking archive, featuring etchings, lithographs, serigraphs, photographs and personal writings, including diary entries and letters. It offers a unique insight into Bhatt's practice and philosophy. Over the years, his photographic documentation of India's living traditions forged a profound dialogue with his graphic prints.
Indian Express
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
How artist Jyoti Bhatt questioned power hierarchies and chronicled his times
The visual language of one of India's most distinguished artist-pedagogues, Jyoti Bhatt, combined modernism with traditional idiom, as his engagements left a deep imprint on Indian art. In the exhibition titled 'Line and the Lens' at Latitude 28 in Delhi, Rekha Rodwittiya — artist and his student at Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) of Baroda in the late '70s — has woven together decades of his art practice, reflecting on the evolution of his oeuvre and that of the Indian art landscape. In this interview, Rodwittiya discusses her fondest memories of her beloved teacher and her curatorial vision for the exhibition celebrating Bhatt. Excerpts from an interview: I have always said that while I was studying at FFA (1976-1981), Jyoti Bhatt was the only teacher who exemplified, through his teaching and conduct, a lived and practised understanding of feminism. He addressed his responsibilities of being an educator very seriously, exposing his students to varied areas of articulation within the arts – yet never preferencing anything as being more or less deserving of attention to curiosities. He has been a major contributor to defining the pedagogic content of the syllabi at the faculty, and with students from varied cultural backgrounds he insisted that an openness to diverse cultural practices was respected within the classroom. He loved to deconstruct methods and techniques to share with us, and was wary of anyone holding things as too precious to be questioned. All students were equal to him. He disliked any display of power hierarchy, and always stated that he learned from his students because their questions led him to new areas of inquiry. At a personal level, one of my most impactful experiences was when as his student, after a particularly gruelling submission session, he said to me that I could view critique as damning or I could view it as a compliment that indicated that people held an expectation of me. These works of the artist are known as the series 'Living Traditions'. This archive is hugely significant because it serves to document, what he himself refers to, as vanishing practices. However, for me this archive serves another less obvious factor of importance. The wanderings of his travel create this journeying back and forth between the many worlds of 'his India'. It positions his engagement with plural and parallel existences that otherwise get ignored. He is, however, never the outsider or the voyeur – he is within the images he takes despite his physical absence, because he has the connect of empathy that allows him to be the sutradhar of these other worlds. He brings them to you to also belong within. The camera therefore isn't a device to 'record' but to perpetual memory. Jyoti Bhatt is never shy of what constitutes his value system and therefore the personal politics that shapes his thinking. He grew up in Bhavnagar, where he was exposed to the changes India was experiencing through the Independence movement, and through the industrialisation that the British Raj had swept to our shores. Extraordinarily, he displays his political alertness at the tender age of 12, when he paints an image that references the reality of a lower caste Dalit man having to proclaim his presence to the upper castes by wearing a broom what sweeps away the imprint of his existence, so as to avoid polluting them even in passing. As an artist he continues to exhibit an informed understanding of how visual language provides a vocabulary that can be read, and which accommodates a commentary with referential indicators that are infused with specific meaning. We see this very clearly in the works he did in 1975-77 that holds the commentary of censure in which he refers to MF Hussain equating Indira Gandhi as mother India, during the time of the Emergency. Jyoti Bhatt has always been someone who discredits systems of elitism and hierarchies. He worked outside of any need to hold attention to any personal space of self-glorification. However this did not mean he did not see his art practice as holding relevance and belonging within the discourses around him. What he positioned was the idea of disseminating a work of art through an edition, therefore becoming a means and method by which his art could reach and belong to many people. He also strongly believes in the idea of democratising his art practice by keeping his prices very nominal and not playing up to the manipulations of an art market. Perhaps this is because Jyotibhai has never cared to be prescriptive. Respectful of the choices and functioning of other artists and art institutions, he nonetheless configures his own operative systems as an artist, to what his personal beliefs adhere to. Jyotibhai and Jyotsnaben's doors have always been open. When I was a student and on one occasion when I needed to attend a theory class, both of them babysat my infant son. It is a tradition within Baroda where the communication and relationship with students or young artists does not end at the college front gate, or at the exit of an exhibition gallery. Jyotibhai, in his belief of equal relationships, views his interaction with all whom he interacts with, with the greatest of openness and humility. There is never a time that I have visited him, when my favourite dish of Batata Poha isn't made and kept ready for me. This, I think, best exemplifies the platform of how he engages with those who visit him. His genuineness and his comfort with who he is, allows for others to find their comfort in their discourses with him.
