Five decades of Shipra Bhattacharya’s work on view at Chennai’s Lalit Kala Akademi

Chennai: From desire and the female body to protest, war and a changing natural world, Kolkata artist Shipra Bhattacharya looks back at nearly five decades of making images out of what she finds difficult to put into words.

Her retrospective, currently on view at Lalit Kala Akademi, brings works from her student years in the late 1970s to the present.

At the gallery, a woman’s body can hold a city, and desire returns repeatedly — as both a title and an idea. Elsewhere, war, protest, environmental anxiety and the peculiar helplessness of watching a society in crisis enter the frame.