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Dear dears,
lot has happened since you last heard from us. We are excited to introduce Studio Bridge Bharat, our first physical space in Gurgaon. We felt a deep reverberating hum of love as many of you joined us on August 23rd, 2024, for our inaugural show.
We’d love to hear your thoughts—please take a moment to leave us a Google review!
You can access our digital catalogue here.
My name is Ayushi Chaurasia. I joined Bridge Bharat as a Creative director in July. During the launch, while giving one of many walkthroughs, someone asked what draws me to the arts? It keeps the blood flowing to my heart. I’m an artist who creates collages, an archivist, and an educator who teaches undergraduates at Ashoka University in the spring. I’m also a writer and researcher of art history, having written and hosted the Indian Art History podcast by Mash Podcast. I thrive on absurdity, humour and good old fashioned sightings of birds, fungi and abandoned houses.
Working with Bridge Bharat is my most exciting project yet. I’m thrilled to collaborate with Aakanksha Singh, the founder, as we experiment and produce programs that bring India’s legacy arts to you.
We warmly invite you to visit our studio and explore our current display. It’s no coincidence that we opened just three days before Janmashtami. The exhibition begins with Lord Krishna, captured beautifully by Dinesh Soni in his Pichwai and Jain Paintings. The show relishes in the visual symbols that Krishna is known for such as the captivating imagery of Shrinathji adorned in jewellery, surrounded by cows and Kadam tree. The Gond and Mandana paintings by Venkat Shyam and Vidya Soni, capture the abstract patterns trapped within the form of trees and animals. MKM rugs brought their Litchi motif hand woven carpets.
To deepen the understanding of these narratives, we’ve incorporated objects like colours, brushes, and gond (glue) previously owned and used by the artists, along with photographs of them at work. We also feature elements like indigo and gold foil. The question we pose is: What happens when the complex political histories of these objects interact with the inherent visual narratives of legacy artworks like Pichwai, Gond, Jain Paintings, Mandana, and antiquities?
