In South Asia, motherhood is often treated symbolically — idealised in mythology and erased in public life. Mumbai and Bengaluru based multidisciplinary artist Pragati Dalvi Jain refuses to do both or either. She neither glorifies nor simplifies the maternal experience. Her work engages with maternal care as unpaid, repetitive, and invisibilised emotional labour. The images she makes do not aim to represent motherhood, but to materialise its effects: the wear of time, the loss of language, and the persistence of presence.
In 'A Pound of Feathers', her debut solo exhibition with APRE Art House, Colaba, the artist reimagines the brutal metaphor of "a pound of flesh" into something equally weighted, yet tender: a pound of feathers. The show takes its name from a reversal of the Shakespeare metaphor, shifting the idea of justice from violence to softness. In Dalvi Jain's lexicon, softness is not submission. Her refusal to perform emotional labour as expressive excess or dramatic catharsis challenges dominant expectations around how women are supposed to 'feel' or 'show' in art. Here, emotion is sedimented — it accumulates like breath: quiet and persistent.
The black-and-white surfaces I make aren’t austere, they are tender in their restraint. They carry the textures of what’s unsaid, the grit of fatigue, the hush of withheld emotion.Pragati Dalvi Jain
"I work without colour not to mute feeling, but to let form, weight, and breath speak more clearly," Dalvi Jain says. "I want you to see the tremble, the drag, the press, the subtle but relentless labour beneath the quiet." Rather than conceal these ruptures, she formalises them in her work. Stalled gestures, layered pauses, and hesitant marks become compositional strategies. In Dalvi Jain's practice, these are not just abstractions; they are articulations of a life lived in service of others, often invisibly.
What's particularly significant is Dalvi Jain's approach to materiality in her work. Her black-and-white surfaces are not empty — they are saturated with the unspoken and the unheard. By choosing restraint over spectacle, her work critiques the demand for emotional productivity even within the art world, where personal narrative often becomes commodified. She offers, instead, a practice that embraces interruption, process, and ambiguity. It is not designed for immediate legibility, but for dwelling on — a particularly bold stance in a cultural milieu that prioritises clarity, explanation, and legibility, especially from women artists.
'A Pound of Feathers' is at once a meditation on visibility, value, and the ethics of presence. In a culture where domestic and emotional labour continues to be feminised, unpaid, and undervalued, Dalvi Jain's work makes visible that which is often unseen, and does so without spectacle. It insists on tenderness as form, not just feeling, in the evolving discourse on gender and art in South Asia.
Pragati Dalvi Jain's 'A Pound of Feathers' is on view at APRE Art House, Colaba, until July 5 2025. Learn more about the exhibition here.
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