Reminisce about Halcyon Times Print

Priyadarshini Ohol came to the arts after a ski accident equipped with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and experience in business and high impact socio-political activism. Post recuperation, Ohol spent years in her Himalayan studio in Dharamshala, establishing an influential, independent, avant garde practice which finds expression in painting, performance, video, performative painting, butoh, poetry, articles, interdisciplinary immersive installations, experimental and collaborative works. This examination and transformation of misery, fate, human experience into thriving life rooted in radical self care, scientific inquiry, authenticity, freedom, play is at the core of her art practice. Ohol’s sensitive multilayered performances play with perceptions, challenge norms and change art landscapes. Derivatives of her work appear, the subjects she examines and the language find their way into variegated vocabularies. Yet, her abstract expressionist canvases clearly indicate her irreverence for categories betraying a fierce need for artistic freedom. She says her work includes stream of consciousness art, yet given it’s reflexive dynamism, it is best described by the term agile art. Ohol’s is a complex social practice examining the self in relation to the world, equality, exclusion, inclusion, identity, belonging, dehumanization, discrimination, casteism, freedom, sexuality, gender, feminism, possession, dispossession, ethics, classism, displacement, fraternity, regional and global politics, the politics of locations of the body, the meaning of art, possibilities of artistic cultural impact and artivism in an increasingly changing, conflict ridden, technologically driven, globalized, fragmented world.