ART

DUBAI
2024
Samanta Batra Mehta

Samanta Batra Mehta grew up in Bombay, India and lives in New York, USA. She creates multi-layered
artwork that is a commentary on the human condition and the environment we inhabit. Themes in identity,
personal history, gender constructs, socio-political order and colonial history are depicted and debated in
her layered artistic interventions that employ drawing, found objects, text, photo and installation. In a
contemporary re-imagining of the ‘exquisite corpse’ genre, she oftentimes re-purposes collected
antiquarian objects, imagery and texts along with her own drawings to render an altered visual engagement
in an attempt to construct a reimagined history.

In Samanta’s visual vocabulary, the human form and anatomical imagery is intertwined with foliage and
nature. Nature/land/landscape is seen as a metaphor for the body (and vice-versa) and as a site for
germination, nourishment, degradation, trespass, plunder, colonization and transgression. Her influences
include history, myth, the natural world, medieval illustration, religious iconography and mystical
philosophies.

As an Indian artist living in New York for more than a decade, Samanta’s work oftentimes speaks of
dislocation and migration. Her work examines what it means to be rooted in a constant state of flux. As an
incorrigible collector, her collections (of antiquarian maps, books, engravings and vintage objects) and her
resultant artworks, give Samanta a sense of permanence and points of reference in her shifting physical and
emotional geographies.

Her first solo, ’Cabinet of Curiosities’, with Shrine Empire, New Delhi in 2014 was nominated for the Forbes
India Art Award in the ‘Best Debut Solo’ category. Her second solo ‘The Journey of Secrets’, was at Sakshi
Art Gallery, Mumbai in 2015, and was featured in a solo interview with Bloomberg TV, in the Aspire segment
(August 2015). Her third solo project, ‘The Crucible of Fantasy’ was with Shrine Empire Gallery, presented at
Art Basel Hong Kong 2015.

Samanta’s work has been showcased by galleries at leading art fairs including at Art Stage, Singapore
(2010), India Art Fair, New Delhi (2011-2016), Bologna Arte Fiere 2013, Art Basel Hong Kong in 2014 and
2015 and Art Dubai (2016).

Samanta Batra Mehta’s work has been exhibited in the US and abroad including at the Queens Museum of
the Arts, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and Aicon Gallery in New York, the Hunterdon Museum and
the Visual Arts Center in New Jersey, the Taubman Museum of Art in Virginia, and Artopia, Milan, among
others. In 2010 she was invited by Galerie LMD, Paris to exhibit her work and make a 24-foot-long site-
specific mural at the Salon Du Dessin Contemporain, held at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris. Her work was
included in the ‘Reading Room’, a Partner Exhibition at the Kochi Biennale 2014 in Kochi, India. The
exhibition travelled to the Alliance Francaise Delhi and at Winchester School of Art, United Kingdom in
2015.

She participated at Wave Hill’s 2020 Winter Workspace Residency in New York.
Samanta Batra Mehta
The Memory Project / 21 Dreams
Altered negatives, archival print on paper
21 prints, 8.25 x 11 inches each
Edition 3 of 5 + 2 a/p
2024
INR 7,50,000/- | USD 9100
Samanta Batra Mehta
The Memory Project 1
Altered negative, archival print on paper
35 x 26 inches
Edition 3 of 5 + 2 a/p
2024
INR 2,75,000 | USD 3500
Samanta Batra Mehta
The Scribe and the Storyteller
Ink, antiquarian maps and prints
100 x 60 inches (installation variable), set of 12
2024
INR 12,75,000/- | USD 15500
Details
Details
Samanta Batra Mehta
Under the Same Sky
Collage on vintage globe
12 x 12 x 12 inches
2023
INR 2,75,000/- | USD 3500
Samanta Batra Mehta
Arrivals and Departures / a biography of the untethered
Collage on vintage mid-century globe, wooden stand
20 x 20 x 17 inches
2024
INR 6,75,000/- | USD 8200
Installation View
(Reference image)

Samanta Batra Mehta

Parables, Prophesies and other Incantations
Vintage box, glass bottles, prints, maps, drawings
20.5 x 9 x 12 inches (approx.)
2024
INR 7,50,000/- | USD 9100
Neerja Kothari

Neerja Kothari is an artist currently living and working from Kolkata, India.

Neerja’s work deals with the investigation of the absurd. It’s an attempt at trying to quantify an
unquantifiable experience. This is inspired by the time spent in physical rehabilitation recovering from motor
sensory neuropathy. Every movement that the brain forgot had to be relearned. The process was slow and
fragmented. Every movement was broken down to its smallest bit. And then bit by bit the bigger ideas were
formulated. The work then emerges as an investigation of larger existential questions.

Derived from multiple instances and memories the work becomes an accumulation of time, labor, process,
memories, marks and numbers. Therefore the work is at a point where a lived experience is being
translated, explored and represented. There is a struggle to find that mode of representation, a search for a
new code or new language or just simply an ongoing narrative : Of the quantifying and the unquantifiable;
The emotional memories in contrast to the muscle memory that had to be restored. A constant going on. A
constant exploration and investigation into anything and nothing and everything.

She holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, USA. She has been
awarded fellowships at the Ucross Foundation, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo,
MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center and the La Napoule Art
Foundation.

Her work has also been published in the New American Paintings (NE#110) journal and the Manifest
International Drawing Annual INDA8.

Some of her selected exhibitions include Art Mumbai, Shrine Empire, Maharashtra (2023); Delhi
Contemporary Art Week, Shrine Empire, New Delhi (2023); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, curated by Shubigi Rao
(2022-23); Keeping Score, Shrine Empire, New Delhi, India
(2021); Hub India at Artissima, Turin, Italy (2021); Caressing History, Prameya Art Foundation, Shrine Empire,
New Delhi (2018); Drawing Connections: 23rd Drawing Show, Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts,
Boston, MA (2013)
Neerja Kothari
prescribed drawing #6 (6 hrs 25 mins - 2729)
Ink on paper
36 x 48 inches
2024
INR 7,50,000/- | USD 9100
Details
Details

Details
Neerja Kothari
prescribed drawing #7 (6 hrs 25 mins - 2338)
Ink on paper
36 x 48 inches
2024
INR 7,50,000/- | USD 9100
Details
Details
Neerja Kothari
prescribed drawing #9 ( 10 hrs 18 mins-4791)
Ink on paper
60 x 48 inches
2024
INR 11,00,000/- | USD 13500
Details
Details
Neerja Kothari
prescribed drawing #8
Ink on paper
6 x 8 inches each, set of 110
2024
INR 25,00,000/- | USD 30200
Individual image
About the Gallery

Anahita Taneja and Shefali Somani founded Shrine Empire in 2008. Since its inception, Shrine Empire has
consistently focused on promoting artists from the South Asian region whose practices emphasize process,
research, and conceptual use of media and material. The gallery’s programming has created a unique
identity for the space through curated exhibitions and propositions, as well as commissioned projects which
explore crossings between aesthetics and social/political concerns of its immediate context. Shrine Empire’s
community includes a large network of local and international partners, and in collaboration, the gallery
contributes to building discourse on contemporary art in South Asia through discussions, artist talks,
workshops and patronage. For the past several years, the gallery extended its outreach programs to build a
strong base for the arts locally through sustained educational initiatives and by supporting alternative
practices. The founders, who were recently awarded the Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the
French government, consolidated their outreach initiatives under the not-for-profit Prameya Art Foundation
[PRAF] in 2017

Email: info@shrineempiregallery.com
Website: https://www.shrineempiregallery.com/