Voices

Nabanita Saha is a highly skilled visual artist with a keen sensitivity to cultural and natural change and loss. I had the grace to collaborate with her on a painted sculpture and installation several years ago. She is a clear speaking and effective collaborator. Hopefully, many people will see her near tragic portrait of the Ganges.

Nabanita Saha’s work unfolds at the intersection of ecological consciousness and lived experience, rooted in the textures of India yet resonant far beyond its borders. Her luminous palette and evocative forms draw from the deep well of Indian cultural memory, reimagined through a language that is unmistakably her own. In recent years, her journeys across India, China, and Spain have opened her practice to a wider, more fluid horizon, where questions of environment and belonging take on a shared, global urgency. What emerges is a body of work that moves gracefully between place and passage, at once intimate in its origins and expansive in its reach.

I have known Nabanita for nearly twenty-five years now. Back then, we were all trying to find our own paths when it came to what to paint and why to paint. Nabanita would observe every small detail of the familiar world around her with great attention. She paid even more attention to those unseen stories hidden within everyday scenes — stories that, if captured on a canvas, would bring a painting to life on its own. This is the essence of Nabanita’s own way of creating art. In Nabanita’s paintings, one can see the unseen world hidden within our everyday, familiar reality. Nabanita knows how to see, and so she knows how to show things simply.

I first met Nabanita Saha in 2013, when I offered her a three-month studio residency at Stellwerk Basel — Switzerland’s first incubator for the creative industries, which I led at the time. Her exhibition at Stellwerk’s Locomotive space marked the beginning of a friendship and professional dialogue that has continued ever since. What strikes me about her work is the rare combination of filigree painterly craft and a clear ethical compass. Nabanita engages with subjects that matter — water as a lifeline, the sacred and threatened presence of the Ganges, the fragile relationship between human life and the natural world — and she does so without polemic. Her painting trusts the viewer. The detail rewards slow looking; the politics emerge from the image itself. Her trajectory across Asia and Europe demonstrates that this is a contemporary voice that reaches across geographies. Her ambition to create work that holds artistic substance and ecological consequence in the same breath is, in my view, what makes her practice quietly important.