THE JOURNEY BEGINS - Uthra Rajgopal

Sunaina Bhalla has gone through the journey of breast cancer. During her diagnosis, prognosis and treatment Sunaina felt passionately about the need to explore and share her experience through her art practice and in particular, the need to connect with a broad cross section of society, to raise awareness of the psychological and emotional aspects of breast cancer. 

Sunaina feels that there is a lack of support and ‘safe’ spaces in South Asia for women and their families to come together and share each other’s stories. Having been through this process herself, Sunaina knows first-hand from her own personal journey the issues that women must negotiate between the private, feminine body and the cultural and social spaces. 

In her most recent solo exhibition in Singapore (2020-21) ‘Sharps and Such’, Sunaina situated her own body, using her mammogram images and layering them with stitch to explore the surfaces of pain, both in the body and mind. As a result of this solo show, so many members of the public who visited the exhibition at the gallery and online, reached out and opened up about their own experiences and journeys of illness, whether it was their own personal story or that of a loved one. 

The heartfelt success of this exhibition inspired Sunaina to go on to do more work in this area often regarded as a taboo area in South Asian culture to encourage others to come forward to talk about their experiences of cancer. However, she didn’t want this to be a short term fix. And so, in collaboration with Tapan Mittal-Deshpande, Founder of Thotpot and Uthra Rajgopal, a Curator with a specialist interest in textiles, they formulated a long term vision to offer conducive spaces, through art, for people to gather, talk, share and feel connected. 

As Sunaina’s practice is centred around stitch, installation and print and as Thotpot regularly works with and engages communities through textile art projects in the Mumbai area, there was a natural and obvious synergy to look at textiles and art. Cloth, threads and stitches all lend themselves to protection and healing, whether physically on the body, in the home or metaphorically. And so, piece by piece, slowly and meticulously, Sunaina and the women workforce at Thotpot created a magnificent, large-scale quilt, that embodies and echoes their hopes, wishes and dreams for all of us to come together, be heard, be inspired and heal. 

Hence we have called our initiative R.I.S.E which stands for Resilient and Inspiring Stories of Empowerment. We proudly present Body Terrains which marks the inaugural exhibition of R.I.S.E.