About

PRAF Participatory is an initiative by Prameya Art Foundation that invites international artists to develop a project with the participation of emerging artists and scholars in India, exploring the possibilities of meaningful, intimate, and informal exchanges. As part of its intent to supplement conventional pedagogy, this initiative asks: What can we learn from each other when we think together?

The third edition, curated by Anushka Rajendran, invites Bracha L. Ettinger, to work with a small group of artists, feminists, psychoanalysts and academics to read, discuss and make artwork together through a series of interactive online interactions spread over three weeks. During these sessions, a selection of texts by Ettinger on her path breaking, feminist theoretical work focused on the 'Matrixial Borderspace’ will be discussed, encouraging responses from the participants in writing, drawing, and translations of excerpts from the original text in other languages that the participants might speak, as an exercise in generating new meanings while thinking through another language. These responses and excerpts from Bracha L. Ettinger's writing will collaborate to form a publication that will be released by PRAF and Institut Francais in 2021 accompanying an exhibition of her works.

About the artist

Bracha L. Ettinger (b. Tel Aviv 1948) is a prominent international visual artist, painter, feminist theorist, psychoanalyst, philosopher and creator of the matrixial theory. She coined the concepts of matrixial borderspace, time, gaze and screen, 'transubjective' jointness, 'wit(h)nessing', 'fascinance', 'copoiesis', and suggested a new definition of the human subject constituted with 'feminine transubjectivity'.

Her paintings revolve around Eros and Thanatos, mythological female figures who were mortified (Eurydice, Medusa, Ophelia, Persephone) and historical, transgenerational and personal traumas of women in times of war. The images engage with birth, female naked body and the killing of women and mothers during the World War 2 Holocaust, based on family figures' destiny in the Ponary forest and in the Stutthof Concentration Camp for Women. Her abstraction that gives form to contemplation of the unconscious, innovates a non-perspectival depth-space in relation to transparency and light with the practice of witnessing, between aesthetics and ethics. The artist is tracing paths of matrixial Eros as it cares and carries traces of trauma and conjoin their strings and threads of memory and oblivion, in the self and with others, with emphasis on a humanizing deceleration of time, affect and intimate, non-monumental scales. In her recent series (Eurydice—Pietà, Eros—Pietà, Medusa) the images encompass her further research on wound and healing, compassion and light, human vulnerability, anxiety, wonder and awe, and the relations between the feminine spirit in mythology (Isis) and in the Cosmos in relation to the psychic future time. For the last five years the artist has been working on a series of oil-paintings, Kaddish - Pietà (not exhibited yet) that revolves around fire and water, mother and child, female body and sea-shells, in relation to the irruption of her own shell-shock and memory of wounds in war time in 1967, when she led a major rescue operation of more than 150 wounded people from a shipwreck. Parallel to painting, Bracha has developed in the last 40 years her art project of notebooks, where images and fragmentary daily thoughts are drafted. The notebooks substantiate the grains of her theoretical ideas in progress.

Exhibitions: Bracha L. Ettinger participates now in Espressioni: the Proposition at Castello di Rivoli, Turin 2020-2021, and will have in the frame of this project a solo show in 2021, and in Psychic Wounds, The Warehouse, Dallas. She had solo presentations at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 and the Istanbul Biennial 2015, and solo-shows at Silesian Museum, Katowice 2017; Tàpies Foundation, Barcelona 2010; Freud Museum, London 2009; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 2000; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1995; MoMA, Oxford, 1993 and more. Ettinger exhibited at ELLE in Centre Pompidou, Paris 2010-2011; Face à l'Histoire, Centre Pompidou, Paris 1996; Inside the Visible, ICA, Boston 1996 and Whitechapel, London 1997; Archive, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1997, and more.

Monographs include: Art as Compassion. Bracha L. Ettinger. Eds C. de Zegher and G. Pollock. Texts by Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Judith Butler, Rosi Huhn, Erin Manning, Griselda Pollock, Catherine de Zegher. (2011). Kabinet Ω: Bracha L. Ettinger. Ed. Viktor Mazin. Texts by: N. Bourriaud, C. Buci-Glucksmann, J. Butler, Jean-Francois Lyotard, V. Mazin, G.Pollock, Olesya Turkina. (2013) (English and Russian). Bracha L. Ettinger. Eurydyka—Pieta / Eurydice—Pieta. Ed. Anna Chromik. Muzeum Śląskie, Katowich. Texts by Alicja Knast, Andrzej Kowalczyk, Anna Chromic, Michal Krzykawski & Ewa Macura-Nnamdi, Griselda Pollock, Nicolas Bourriaud, Bracha L. Ettinger. (2017) (Polish, English and French).

The artist's wide-ranging artworks and her pioneering theoretical writings have strongly influenced art theory, feminism, cultural studies, philosophy and psychoanalysis in the last 30 years. Her books include: The Matrixial Borderspace (2006) and And My Heart Wound-Space (2015). Her most recent book is: Bracha L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Vol I: 1990-2000 (2020), edited by Griselda Pollock. Vol II: 2000-2010 (2021), currently in print.

B.L. Ettinger, PhD, is a trained psychoanalyst; member of TAICP; member of NLS; member of WAP; Chair & Professor of Art and Psychoanalysis, EGS; and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, GCAS..

Contributors

Arjun Khera

Arjun is a Drama and Movement Therapist licensed to practice in the United Kingdom. He runs a private therapy clinic in New Delhi and also advises organizations on matters of disabilities, inclusion and diversity.

 

Divya Singh

Divya is a visual artist. Her practice is primarily rooted in painting and explores themes such as isolation, experience, and memory – emanating largely from a poetic engagement with Time.

 

Harshita Bathwal

Harshita is currently pursuing a PhD in Visual Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. Through her research, she is trying to theorize the notion of text in the field of contemporary visual art.


Khushbu Patel

Khushbu is an Indian artist. Her interdisciplinary art practice spans diverse mediums in various scales, presented in form of installations (site specific/site responding), photography, performative photography, videos, drawings, and performance.

 

Navraj Choudhary

Navraj is a visual artist, who completed her masters in visual arts from Ambedkar University, Delhi in 2020. Her artistic practices explore the idea of imagery around mental health and the taboo attached to it. Through zines and writings, there is an effort to analyze kitsch and the non-conventional ways of representing mental-illness.

 

Shromona Das

Shromona is a researcher in the field of feminist and queer graphic narratives and an artist herself. She has submitted her MPhil dissertation on feminist graphic autobiographies and is about to begin her PhD project of gender and humor in colonial Bengali caricatures (1870-1947).

 

Sibdas Sen Gupta

Sibdas is a conceptual Artist, and writer who works with both artistic and curatorial projects. From 2017 onwards, he has been engaged in a project: ‘While staying near the Capital’, which interrogates various levels of socio-political, geographic questions, alternative visions and imaginations to the idea of NationState.

 

Sukh Mehak Kaur

Sukh is an Illustrator, comic artist based out of Ropar, Punjab and New Delhi. Her choice of work for the past few years has been to illustrate writings, either her's or in collaboration with other writers/artists. She enjoys developing comics, especially around subjects of Coping.

 

Vishnupriya Rajgarhia

Vishnupriya is an artist based out of India and the United Kingdom. Her practice is about weaving together experiences, often devoid of art objects.