In Person: Pritish and Anu Bali on Homemakers

Homemakers is a collaboration between Pritish Bali, who is pursuing his Masters in Visual Arts from the Department of Painting, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and his mother Anu Bali, a homemaker currently living and working in Amritsar, Punjab. Realised through the Serendipity Arts Virtual Grant 2021, the project was churned out of a mix of feeble memories and daily updates of Anu Bali incessantly working over the years. Initially conceptualised as a website, the interface has four interactive sections that aim to sensitise the audience towards the arduous life enforced upon/adopted by a homemaker as well as the growing gender gap in unpaid domestic and care work.

Set up as a small room centred around their website, Homemakers was presented as an installation at the Studio space of the India Art Fair. In this episode of In Person, we spoke with Pritish Bali about the work and how it was imagined within a physical display for the first time. Bali shares the origins of the collaborative project and speaks about the smaller details within the room, which is full of literary references as well as personal objects from his mother’s daily life.

In case you missed the previous episodes of In Person, you can watch them here, here and here.

^{(Featured Image: Installation view of Homemakers by Pritish Bali and Anu Bali at the India Art Fair 2022.)} 

Recorded on 30 April May.