French artist Olympe Ramakrishna’s exhibition in Thiruvananthapuram celebrates Malayali women away from home

A six-metre-long traditional white cotton Kerala sari hangs on the walls of the Alliance Française de Trivandrum art gallery. Printed on the fabric is a painting inspired by the French painter Paul Gauguin, showing lush green landscapes and uneven terrain. The artwork features portraits of six Malayali women and is part of the Voices of the Western Coast exhibition by French artist Olympe Ramakrishna.

Olympe explains that the painting is a tribute to women and their inner strength. Her work celebrates the lives of three mother-daughter pairs: Oliviya-Siya, Sreedevi-Aditi, and Ann-Seena. She represents them in a stylised and simple way, with each face acting as a bridge between past and present, origin and displacement, intimacy and shared memory, as Olympe says.

“Through my practice, I try to understand the identity of today’s women from different regions and translate it through my artistic language,” she says. “I do this by exploring the individual stories of these women, while finding what is common about them.”

Olympe spoke to around 20 women from Kerala living in Bengaluru, from different walks of life, before working on the project. She asked them how it felt to be a woman from Kerala. “I was trying to understand what was common in all their answers. Their responses included things like food, movies, clothing and so on,” says Olympe. “They also had a strong connection with nature and had some childhood memories associated with the State,” she explains, utilising it as a backdrop that unifies the women in the painting.

“For some, Kerala is the place of birth; for others, it is a land of holidays, ancestral homes, and recurring returns. Many grew up elsewhere, yet spent their childhood summers running through grandparents’ houses, tasting ripe mangoes, or observing the slow rhythm of village life,” says the artist, pointing out that these memories are intensified by distance.

“Living away from Kerala transforms cultural identity into a deliberate act — speaking Malayalam at home, cooking traditional dishes, following news and cinema, wearing the traditional Kerala sari whenever possible,” adds Olympe, who had previously worked on a project about the women of Bengaluru.

Artistic process

Olympe’s practice combines painting, collage, textile art, and embroidery, and explores representations of femininity and contemporary female identity in India.

“My father was a fashion designer, and I grew up around fabric. This is my fourth project on sari,” says Olympe, expressing her affinity towards the medium.

The artist’s process began with creating a triptych of oil paintings, each featuring one mother-daughter duo. These portraits were later photographed and digitally assembled into a single composition before being finally printed onto the sari, the artist explains.

Olympe says she relates to the women she paints on a personal level, as she is someone who has moved away from her home and lives away from her roots. The artist says she never feels fully at home anywhere and carries a perpetual burden of feeling like an outsider.

Voices of the Western Coast exhibition is on at Alliance Française de Trivandrum, Vazhuthacaud, till March 28. Time: from 10am to 5pm.