The Umbrella

Puja Sarkar, an Indian multidisciplinary contemporary artist, curator and cultural practitioner. For more than two decades, she has been developing a practice rooted in lived experience, memory and the emotional complexities of being human. Her journey into art was not entirely planned - it emerged from life itself, and gradually became a language through which she could understand, question and transform my own experiences. Her work begins with the personal but does not remain there. She explore memory, identity, feminist perspectives, emotional resilience and human connection, often through familiar objects that carry an unexpected psychological weight. Handbags, umbrellas, safety pins, combs, mobile phones and other everyday forms become metaphors for what we carry within us—our memories, relationships, desires, fears, vulnerabilities and hopes. She is fascinated by the moment when an ordinary object stops being merely an object and begins to speak about the human condition. A significant part of her artistic consciousness was shaped by a life-changing accident and experience in 2000, which altered her relationship with memory, time and continuity. Rather than representing that experience literally, she transformed its fragments into a visual vocabulary of symbolic objects, layered surfaces, vivid colour and surreal associations. Her paintings often inhabit the space between reality and imagination, where what is visible is only one layer of what is being felt. She is particularly inspired by the emotional honesty of Frida Kahlo and the liberating power of Henri Matisse’s colour. Yet her visual language has grown from my own cultural context, personal history and observations of contemporary life. she wants her paintings to remain open enough for viewers to enter with their own memories and emotions. At the heart of her practice is a simple belief: personal experience can become a shared emotional space. she wants her work to make visible the things people often carry silently—and to transform vulnerability into connection, memory into dialogue, and ordinary objects into unexpected mirrors of ourselves. Beyond her studio practice, her commitment to art extends into curatorial, cultural and social work through SMS, the artistic and socio-cultural organisation she founded in 2009, and Bhalobasa Welfare Society (Non-Profit Organization), through which she connects creativity with humanitarian engagement. For her, art is ultimately not only about what she creates. It is about what happens between the work and the person standing before it. If a painting allows someone to recognise a forgotten part of themselves, feel something they could not articulate, or reconnect with something they thought they had lost, then the work has found its true purpose.