Woman artists, individually, since ages have been influenced by certain realities, personal experiences and facts of life while translating their thoughts into visual forms through their own language at different phases of their creative life.They have tried to realize their womanhood as a genre from the past and present, under various influences of the society, in tune with natural and organic forces of life and also in their personal struggle to establish their identity within their own space.

They have questioned their absence, asserted their presence, and raised the issues of inclusion and exclusion in different spheres of life by the society. Woman artists, more than often, take a clear position to redefine and understand their own existence vis-à-vis the social milieu.The typical representations of womenas mother or a goddess playing a given stereotypical role in the society dominated by male presence and patriarchy have repeatedly triggered questions and threw challenges to forcewomen to think and re-think about their own identities. It has intrigued them to re-examine the usage and thoughts of ‘women’ in the contemporary context andsearch the position of women in the light of religious, historical, social, political, natural, personal and local myths.This has led them tocontest the influence of male gaze which created taboos, influenced and exercised control on the image of a woman and simultaneously the male positioning in the society.

For some women artists, the central concern is how often the industrial society dominated by profiteering dogma completely ignores and abolishes the Mother Nature and takes away its solace and soothe from the life of ours. Such crude a reality creates strong impetus within a creative persona to reconstruct nature’s presence by fetching raw nature into her work both as a medium and as a conceptual and metaphorical element and thereby rebuilding a faith of gaining back nature in life and giving it it’s due respect and importance.

The memories from past also dominates the fabric of existence and the creative persona of the artists who explores paper weaving as a process to weave the warp of memories with the politically influenced situations to raise questions on present identity, existence and being. Through her work she tries to see the present being as a multifaceted encounter between past and the present, memory and physicality. Here too she uses the medium as a metaphor to speak for the forgotten or lost narratives.

Each woman also has a very individualistic personal space of her own. Lot of small and apparently insignificant objects around a woman defines and helps her and others to understand her better. Both organic and inorganic diminutive objects like dry leaves, insects, flowers, a window seal becomes very delicately meaningful for her and builds a personal philosophy to support her identity, existence and creative expression in her work.

Here, in Femme Quartet we present 4 such woman artists namely Arpita Akhanda, Meenakshi  Sengupta,Promiti Hossain and Ruma Choudhury who through their art works and drawings bring ‘recontextualization’, ‘nature as a source’, ‘memory and present’ and ‘personal space’ as their thematic oeuvre in a cohesive manner like a quartet concert, to have a re-look at womanhood in a broader sense of the term.