Pritika Chowdhry

Pritika Chowdhry
Visual artist
Location: Chicago (US)

Pritika is an artist, curator, scholar and educator. Born and raised in India, Pritika is currently based in Chicago, IL in the United States. Pritika holds a master’s degree in visual arts. A master’s degree in visual culture and gender studies from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Exhibits.

Pritika has shown her work nationally and internationally in group and individual exhibitions at the Weismann Museum in Minneapolis. At the Queens Museum in New York. Hunterdon Museum in New Jersey. Islip Art Museum in Long Island. Visual Arts Center in New Jersey. Temporary DoVA at the University of Chicago. Brodsky Center at Rutgers University and at the Cambridge Art Gallery in Massachusetts.

Pritika is a recipient of a Vilas International Travel Grant. From an Edith and Sinaiko Frank scholarship for a woman in the arts. Wisconsin Arts Board Scholarship and Minnesota State Arts Board Scholarship. She has taught at Macalester College and the College of Visual Arts, both in St. Paul, Minnesota. The scholarship published on Pritika’s work has been published in peer-reviewed research publications and various exhibition catalogs.

Artist conferences.

Pritika has presented her studio research projects at various national conferences, such as the International Arts Symposium at NYU. The Contested Terrains of Globalization at UC-Irvine and the South Asian Conference at UW-Madison. Prithika also participates in panels and gives lectures and artist talks on her work by invitation.

STATEMENT BY THE ARTIST.

I practice counter-memory and I create anti-memory sculptural installations of traumatic historical events. Through my artistic projects, I present narratives that are elided from the dominant cultural discourse to disrupt the hegemonic collective memories.

Memorial Project.

I founded the Partition Memorial Project and the Counter-memory Project. Transnational in scope, it includes sculptural art installations that commemorate difficult memories from around the world. Such as country partitions. Civil and military wars. Riots, border violence, genocides and terrorist attacks.

My large-scale sculptures and site-sensitive installations refer to the body to commemorate unbearable and difficult memories.

Counter-memories.

I seek to connect seemingly disparate geopolitical contexts because I believe it is important to build bridges. The counter-memories of communities and nations provide the viscera with which I build these bridges in my work.

Interdisciplinary artist, I migrate between fibers, latex, paper, clay, glass, metal, wood, poetry and drawing. The creator in me appreciates the sensuality of different materials, and the scholar in me pursues the cultural references that different materials introduce into my work.