Pritika Chowdhry

Pritika Chowdhry is an artist, curator, scholar and educator born and raised in India and now based in Chicago, Illinois. She has an MFA in Studio Art and an MA in Visual Culture and Gender Studies from the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

A practitioner of counter-memory, she says, “I create sculptural installations that are anti-memorials of traumatic historical events. Through my art projects, I present narratives that are elided from dominant cultural discourse to disrupt hegemonic collective memories.”

She founded the Partition Memorial Project and the Counter-Memory Project. Transnational in scope, these research-based art projects comprise sculptural art installations that memorialise difficult memories from around the world, such as partitions of countries, civil and military wars, riots, border violence, genocides and terrorist attacks.

The large-scale sculptures and site-sensitive installations reference the body to memorialise unbearable and difficult memories.

“I seek to connect seemingly disparate geopolitical contexts because I believe that it is important to bring bridges into being. Counter-memories of communities and nations provide the viscera with which I build these bridges in my work.”

As an interdisciplinary artist, her work moves between fiber, latex, paper, clay, glass, metal, wood, poetry, and drawing. She adds, “The maker in me enjoys the sensuality of different materials, and the scholar in me pursues the cultural references that different materials introduce into my work.”

Pritika has shown her works nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions in the Weismann Museum, Queens Museum in New York, the Hunterdon Museum in New Jersey, the Islip Art Museum in Long Island, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, and the Cambridge Art Gallery in Massachusetts.