Draft:Shelly Bahl

Shelly Bahl is an Indian-Canadian artist, curator, and educator, who currently lives in New York City. Her artwork is interdisciplinary and includes drawing, painting, sculpture/ installation, performance, photography and video. She has had many solo and group exhibitions in North America and internationally since the mid-1990s.

Early life and education
Bahl was born in Benares, India in 1970, and in childhood she moved to Toronto, Canada with her family. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Art and Art History in 1993 from York University in Toronto and a Master of Arts in Studio Art in 1995 from New York University.

Career
Bahl has been active in the Toronto and New York City art scenes since the mid-1990s, primarily in feminist and BIPOC-focused exhibitions and arts programming. She is a founding artist member and the inaugural director of SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) and ZEN-MIX 2000, Pan-Asian Visual Arts Network in Toronto.

Bahl is a former board member, of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective in NYC where she curated and co-curated the SAWCC Salon, performance art programs, and experimental film and video programs, including, "Ritual Traces," "Beauty," "Sublime," "Patterns of Interaction." She was also a member of Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network.

Bahl is a member of the feminist art collective, The Paglees, a group of 7 mid-career South Asian women artists based in the USA. Their first exhibition in 2024 in Chicago was positively reviewed in various publications, including The Reader, New City , and Sixty Inches From Center.

In 2022-23 Bahl was a co-curator and visiting artist for "Be(Coming) the Museum" at the Lahore Museum and Beaconhouse University in Pakistan. Writing for the Karachi Collective, Aarish Sardar described the exhibition as "re-visiting and reimagining] the truths and fiction grounded in particular cultural histories with wide-ranging artistic concerns related to identity, diaspora, cultural hybridity, and gender politics.

In 2024, Bahl curated, "What is Seen and Unseen: South Asian American Art in Chicago", at South Asia Institute, which focused on the little-known history of South Asian American art in the city. The Chicago Tribune called it a "Top 10 for art in Chicago." and the exhibition is the first comprehensive study of South Asian artists’ contributions to Chicago’s art history. By merging social and immigration history with art history, the 100+ year survey contextualizes the dynamic and yet little known local art community and key projects.

Themes
Bahl's art explores cultural hybridity, the effects of cultural colonialism, trans-culturism, and the global transmission of visual culture.* These are based on existing cultural histories, that the artist then re-contextualizes and reimagines.

Bahl’s artwork often examines the dynamics of South Asian culture, especially as it relates to women in the diaspora. This can be seen in her photo series, "A Day In the Life," (2007), shot at the now closed Terminal 2 at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. In the surreally depopulated airport, a sort of signifier of transitory and transcultural space, the women in Bahl’s photos exchange social roles in ways that would be uncomfortable or unthinkable in actuality. The expensively dressed traveller, for example, is seen matter-of-factly mopping a toilet stall (considered an insultingly distasteful job in South Asian culture) in a complete subversion of her traditional status. This gently off-kilter social commentary continues in her video piece "Pink Is The Navy Blue Of India," (2003), in which Bahl again addresses notions of subcontinental “exoticism” and the appropriation of South Asian culture.

Her interdisciplinary works also examine women's labour and traditional women's craft and handiworks. She often utilizes commercial wallpapers and decorative patterns. For example, Bahl’s drawing, “Karma Chameleon #1,” (2007), is an ink drawing of punk-rock girls raking leaves, sharply delineated in heavy black ink against a background of floral wallpaper. It impresses for many reasons, not the least of which is that the artist brings the ghoulish and decorative into contiguous alignment. It also touches lightly on women’s work and the association with domesticity.

Bahl's feminist perspective can be seen in her longest running art project, an ongoing sculpture series with melting wax female figurines (1994 -to the present day). Shelly Bahl’s work in burning wax lends further atmospheric gravity and spiritual ambiance within gallery spaces. Bahl’s work reveals a slow decapitation of figures with breasts and hips – an intervention that recalls myriad abuses of the female body in the name of organized religion.

In 2022-23, she was a Visiting Artist/ Co-curator of Be(Coming) The Museum at the Lahore Museum in Pakistan. She presented a site-specific installation in the museum's Hindu, Buddhist and Jain galleries that examined the politics of being in a third culture, with the representation of the female body in the hyper world of commercialised media. Bahl then re-visits and re-imagines the truths and fiction grounded in particular cultural histories with wide-ranging artistic concerns related to identity, diaspora, cultural hybridity, and gender politics. The melted wax figures in her work Songs of Lament: Ceremonal-Trinity were kept before the four-headed Lion Capital of Ashoka—these were burnt down and fused in pools of red and white. According to Bahl, the historical objects held in museums still have exciting stories to tell even after defacing due to colonial plunder and post-colonial neglect.

Bahl's interdisciplinary project, "Sisters of Shakti," is the artist's first use of AI generated imagery in her social commentary and story-telling.

Shelly Bahl’s Songs of Lament series (2024) is composed of black wax candles in the shape of devadasis (women dedicated to worship in a temple) arranged in a Rorschach-like pattern. Burned and therefore transformed, the installation is a reflection on how mass production gives us iconographic figures, which themselves have meanings that change with their context.