Navjot Altaf began her career in 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has created an oeuvre which constitutes an ever-growing flow of films, sculptures, spatial / site-oriented installations, and photographs that negotiate various disciplinary boundaries traversing art and political activism. The essence of her imagery comes out of her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and contemporary art, film and cultural theory. Navjot has worked extensively on the problematic of the feminine through her understanding of Marxist/Feminist theory in the fields of social history of art, cultural and psychoanalytic theory which she has analyzed with historical interests in her own art practice.
Read MoreThe artist works with musicians, documentary filmmakers, activists, general public and craftspeople. Since 1997 she has been collaborating with Adivasi /indigenous artists and community members on ongoing Nalpar /handpump sites and Pilla Gudi /temples for children - projects in Kondagaon, Bastar – Chattisgarh in Central India. Her methodology ascertains the interactive aspects of collaboration, whereby the work emerges out of an extended dialogical interaction and simultaneously alters the conventional relationship between the viewer and the work of art.
She has shown extensively in India and several other countries at museums and galleries, including Fukuoka, Sydney, London, Liverpool / Bolton, Berlin, Dusseldorf ,Duisburg,Lisbon, Lille, New York, and other places.
Navjot Altaf lives and works in Mumbai and Bastar
Related Press Critic’s Guide: New Delhi 2 February 2017, Frieze Visual artist and researcher Sonia Mehra Chawla's artistic practice traverses notions of selfhood, nature, ecology and sustainability. Currently a visiting artist and researcher at M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation India, Sonia's ongoing project Critical membrane is on show at Exhibit 320. This exhibition focuses on her artistic enquiry...
Related Press Speaking out: An interview with Navjot Altaf 21 November 2016, Frieze Since the late 1980s, the work of Navjot Altaf has fuelled some of the most energetic conversations in contemporary Indian art. In 1998, despite a thriving practice of painting and sculpture, she relocated from Mumbai to Kondagaon town in the tribal region of Bastar, Chhattisgarh, central India; since then, she has produced artworks around gender...
Related Press Present perfect tense 28 September 2016, The Indian Express Look at the 24 drawings on display at Navjot Altaf’s solo show at Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road, and you would think that the title of the show, How Perfect Perfection Can Be, is an exclamatory statement. The drawings, as Altaf, 66, explains, are inspired by the architectural perfection that she encountered while on a...
Related Press The higher we rise: Artist Navjot Altaf measures skyscrapers against environmental cost 9 September 2016, Scroll The skyscraper is a specimen of precise engineering, with its intricate panels and grids, and the synthesis of glass and steel for function and design. But in artist Navjot Altaf’s latest vision, their perfection comes with a warning: skyscrapers might be destroying the earth. In How Perfect Can Perfection Be, Altaf explores the...
