We present in partner with The Guild, an exhibition of Durgabai Vyam, curated by Nancy Adajania. ‘I will become a river’ (‘Main Nadi Banungi’) features works by the artist that revisit various tales of the Narmada from the inherited Pardhan Gond lore. This exhibition frames the artist’s decades-long engagement with the stories she was raised on, relayed through painting, miniature sculpture, video and song.
The curator Nancy Adajania writes: “Durgabai Vyam belongs to the kinship circle of the late iconic artist Jangarh Singh Shyam. Jangarh advised her to shape her own identity (“Apni pehchaan banao”). As a child, her mythopoetic imagination had been nourished by her grandmother Noni Paraste’s stories but there were times when they had to survive on famine food. As a woman, she knew intuitively how to seize every opportunity for self-fashioning. Immensely confident and undeterred by the boys’ club that has dominated the Jangarh kalam, Durgabai has become one of its leading women artists. Her art is not to be isolated within some simple-minded, patronising rubric like ‘folk art’ or ‘tribal art’. Her painterly trajectory and innovations hold their own alongside a spectrum of artistic achievements irrespective of place and period. She is highly inventive and ambitious in amplifying the scope and scale of her language. We should not write off her formal choices and visionary techniques as merely inherited from the Jangarh kalam or reduce them to the artist’s social, cultural and religious background. The Narmada maiya paintings that form the beating heart of ‘Main Nadi Banungi’ are breakthrough artistic productions. They cannot be confined within a simplistic anthropological framework of interpretation.”
Durgabai Vyam is a Pardhan Gond artist from Barbaspur, Madhya Pradesh. Durgabai was mentored by the legendary artist Jangarh Singh Shyam. Since 1997, she has participated in numerous exhibitions of adivasi art in Bhopal, Delhi, Dehradun, Khajuraho, Indore, Raipur and the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. The artist was invited to participate in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018, where she and her husband, the artist Subhash Vyam, created an experimental graphic narrative on plywood. Durgabai has illustrated or contributed to several books, including The Night Life of Trees (Tara Books, 2006); Sultana’s Dream (Tara Books, 2014); Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land: Dignity of Labour in Our Times (Navayana, 2007). Durgabai and Subhash Vyam have also published a graphic biography of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar titled Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability (Navayana, 2011). In 2008, Durgabai was presented the Bologna Ragazzi Award in Italy for her illustrations in the children’s book, The Night Life of Trees. She was honoured with the Padma Shri in 2022.
Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and curator based in Bombay. She was Joint Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2012). She has curated a number of pathbreaking exhibitions including, ‘A Rising Tide: Women Artists from the Alkazi Collection (Art Heritage Gallery, Delhi, 2025); ‘One Hundred Years and Counting: Rescripting KG Subramanyan’ (Emami Art Gallery, Kolkata & Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore, 2024/2025); Woman Is As Woman Does (CSMVS Museum with JNAF, 2022), a first-ever intergenerational mapping of the works of Indian women artists, filmmakers and activists against the backdrop of the women’s movement in India. Adajania’s other major research-based exhibitions include the retrospectives of artists, Navjot Altaf, Sudhir Patwardhan, Mehlli Gobhai and Nelly Sethna and ‘Counter-Canon, Counter-Culture: Alternative Histories of Indian Art’ on the prehistory of media art in India (Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, 2019). Adajania has proposed several new theoretical models through her extensive writings on subaltern art, media art, public art, collaborative art, transcultural art and the biennale culture in the Global South. For more than two decades, she has written on the practices of women artists of several generations by deploying a trans-disciplinary approach that melds art history, feminist theory, anthropology, activism and philosophy.