Ersilia (Italy to Qatar), Gayatri (Spain to India) and Monica (Angola to Portugal) have all had to cast off previous preconceptions and look at the world through the eyes of a new country.  ‘This Location’  therefore examines how far art is nature, and how much is nurture. What role does environment play in creating ideas and determining style? And, in an increasingly accessible world, it asks if ‘migratory’ art is now playing an increasingly important role in shaping cultures..

Since living in Doha, Ersilia has made several works inspired by Arab culture. She says “the continuous presences of visual images so different from my culture have stimulated my passion for photography, creating a need to frame and picture the reality through my eyes and then reinterpret them through my paintings.” In her work titled “Doha” the dark base that characterizes the whirling movement of her first works, progressively softens as she becomes familiar with the brilliant, but austere Arab culture. In the series of paintings titled “East” images, photographs, letters, incisions or anagrams blend with pictorial signs, with universal symbols- the written language that belongs to all cultures.



“The specificities of location, its history, mythology and present-ness, in which an artist finds herself positioned, are very important in understanding the works of an artist like Gayatri Gamuz” says Johnny M.L, curator and art critic based in New Delhi. He observes that her poignant images addresses the global from a chosen locale and for her this location of Thiruvannamalai is a meeting point of two oppositional forces, the sylvan rural and the globalizing urban.

In “Chinese Doll in South India” and “Teddy Bear in South India”, both works dealing with cultural imports to a distant land, Gayatri directly comments on how materialism has paved way for a culture of dummies, where lifelike dolls take over from human siblings. In the painting of the Teddy bears Gayatri portrays the irony of mutual captivity where humans alienate the animals from their habitat and yet try to naturalize them through surrogate possessions.

“Snow White in South India”, an image of a dirtied doll with ruffled hair is a humorous and introspective look of the artist as a white woman in India.

In “In search of somewhere else” Gayatri looks at the circle of life, destruction, and regeneration through the eyes of a baby sitting with her back to us who contemplates with her head held high the forest on fire. The movable high bed and the pram are comments on the sense of security materialistic objects give to the humans. She talks about stillness and at the same time the moving from place to place like migratory birds or lost penguins……a few flowers on a tree and the balloons announce regeneration and a positive future in the midst of conflagration.


Is “Wonders of the World”, four color photos onto light boxes in which the clowns are depicted all over the globe with iconic places and monuments like the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, Tower Bridge, serving as a backdrop to their joyful and jocund imaginary ‘honeymoon’. Paul Goodwin based at Goldsmiths University and Tate London, says “in these works some of the rough edges of multicultural urbanism are smoothed out by enticing the viewer into a virtual dreamscape of interracial relationships, love and play that appear to transcend the mundane and often aggressive realities of urban living in many of the world’ great cities. The figure of the clown as urban flaneur, globe trotting mongrel and purveyor par excellence of a ‘spread love’ philosophy seems a fitting harbinger of a new metropolitan cosmopolitanism”.

“States” (6 screen printed flags), is another piece that disrupts hegemonic images of nationalism. The flags reflect the pomp and ceremony of national flags as markers of identity. On all of them are images of the artist and her partner dressed as clowns kissing, thus softening the hard surface of nationalism with a playful and absurd dimension.

Yara is Monica’s baby girl and she is a symbol of a land beyond frontiers. Her image is in the 3 large screen-printed flags in Monica’s new oeuvre titled “I am white. I am grey, I am black” which talks about multiplicity of identity and the space where black and white meet in genuine dialogue beyond certainties and fixed assumptions, beyond good and bad.