Watercolours on rice paper, oil pastels on can can fabric, embroidery on net fabric, hair extensions

Debashruti’s practice flowers around the axis of the line. Through long nights in her studio, she would train her point brush on paper and let its movements steer her thinking and her dreaming. Her unique stylistic idioms carry the otherworldly and the extra-ordinary to evoke familiar socialities in terms that radically estrange the conventions of representation. Drawing from the urgency of daily personal experiences, this work opens up an aperture to intimacy—intimacy with the human body, with floral and feline oddkin, with the charged ceremonies of domestic and conjugal life, with the eros of betrayal, with grief and the passing of innocence. Her visual language rests on an alphabet of magic: to access her work is to engage with this intricate worldbuilding, spending time with playful signifiers that speak to a certain protectiveness even as they lay out the unwieldy secret of vulnerability. At Khoj, her compositional interests are interwoven with the spatial; she orders and reorders elements to transform space into place, populating it with fabular and yet recognisable company.