Born in Calcutta in 1955, she has done her BFA in Print making, Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, Viswa Bharati University in 1979 and MFA in Print making, M.S University, Baroda in 1981.
Mimi Radhakrishnan’s recent works with evocative titles and sensuous surfaces make persuasive arguments about the discursive nature of art. They overturn the modernist suspicion of the literary. Given her early formation in Santiniketan as a printmaker combined with her interest in literature, she gives a contemporary twist to the age-old conventions of storytelling.
The art of storytelling was emphatically rejected by modernism in the west. With its invocation of the coordinates of time and space, storytelling could not occur without turning to the past. The story of modernism begins from the time the past becomes a problem1. In India, modernism follows a different dynamic given its colonial prehistory. Storytelling as a mode of representation could not be kept at bay for long. With the entry of women artists since the 1970s, story telling took on quite different resonances because it also entailed not only the stories told but also the story teller, the self of the artist.
