The Shadows of Duality

Anindita Dutta

Opening October 15, 2025

October 15 - December 19th, 2025

The work of Anindita Dutta inhabits the space between material and metaphor, where fragments of the everyday are reassembled into sculptural forms that confront memory, history, and the unseen. Using discarded shoes, fractured purses, inverted carpets, stitched belts, and animal hides, she builds a language of contradiction between resilience and vulnerability as well as rupture and repair. These sculptural excavations expose the shadowed aspects of lived experience, where what is hidden carries as much weight as what is revealed.

Dutta’s process often begins with an act of inversion: cutting, tearing, and stitching materials so that their interiors are exposed. Objects once bound to function are turned inside out, revealing scars, seams, and raw structures. This gesture of exposure brings forward histories otherwise concealed, transforming intimate belongings into cultural artifacts. In their reconfigured state, they cast shadows of memory and contradiction, reminding us that every surface has an underside.

At the core of Dutta’s practice is an exploration of women’s lives across past, present, and future. Bones, spines, and horns emerge as enduring symbols of resistance, while fabric, hair, and gold introduce gestures of tenderness and renewal. Within these pairings lies the essence of duality: survival as both fracture and repair, beauty as both fragile and resilient. Her work insists that vulnerability and endurance are not opposites, but interdependent forces shaping the human condition.

Each sculptural element contributes to this shifting theater of materials. Shoes hollowed into vessels suggest journeys both taken and denied. Carpets, stripped and inverted, unfold as landscapes of memory. Stitched belts embody containment and release, while horns and hides speak to primal endurance. Together, these objects form a choreography of shadows and light, where endings fold into beginnings and contradiction becomes a source of revelation.

Sex,Sexuality and Society - BOTSWANA, 2023, Used shoes, animal horn, hide, 91" x 81" x 13”

The Shadows of Duality reflects Dutta’s ongoing exploration of how materials bear witness to histories of both oppression and resilience. Her practice—intuitive, corporeal, and deeply layered—offers a dramaturgy of survival, where shadow and substance, destruction and creation, exist not as opposites but as companions in dialogue.

Anindita Dutta was born in Jamshedpur, India and studied sculpture at Visva-Bharati University before earning her MFA in sculpture from the University of Iowa. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, the National Museum of Bangladesh, and numerous galleries across Europe and the United States.