Self-affected artist Anu Kalikal’s exhibition, flight lines, currently in Alliance Francais de Trivandrum, are filled with motifs associated with nature. The exhibition is like an Ode in its early relationship with flora and fauna. The recurring appearances of elephants remind the artist of an elephant philosophy in the temple processions during his holidays in Pathanamthitta, which reflects his fighting for childhood and his fight with mental health issues as an adult.
42 -year -old Anu, who had taken to painting at an early age, was in the wall while studying at Madras Christian College. After a one -year break after her graduation, she joined the Master of Fine Arts program at Stella Maris College, Chennai. However, after years of symptoms, he was soon detected schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Negotiations on the lines of flight exhibition. Photo Credit: Nainu Oman
She returned to her family in Dubai and did not paint for five years. “I used to imagine a painting on a canvas by throwing color on it. It was,” Anu says.
“One day my body started jerking, which looked like epilepsy. When my neurologist saw that he asked me what I like to do in my spare time. When I told that I liked to paint, he asked me to get back immediately. His pregnancy was that I had insisted to do my body without doing anything, which I think I think I was doing anything.”
She says a lot of work. “I spent time as a volunteer in an art gallery in Bengaluru and saw it as a treatment. I find art as a remedy for my health issues. You can’t separate the art from me.
It is the 17th exhibition of ANU and it works 27, mostly with acrylic paintings and pen drawing scribals and dots on paper. “When the tremors are worse, the pen is easy to use instead of a brush. Since college, I have been a pen artist. Dotting technique is medical,” Anu says.
A task was drawn using title power, a pen and dotting technology. Photo Credit: Nainu Oman
The roster and I, in acrylic and intoxicating ink, shows Anu in the position of the flax, which is waiting for the intervention of the bird to wake her up for the sunrise witness. In extinction and in nature, the artist reflects the destruction of nature. If you lack compassion, then it questions the definition of success and its futility. The painting leads to a clear duality, indicating the possibility that the artist portrayed one side of the work during an increased phase of his illness and the other when it stopped.
Cock and me on the lines of flight exhibition. Photo Credit: Nainu Oman
In dysfunction, ANU uses acrylic and pen to indicate a variety of dysfunctions, which avoid real work by replacing it with “different types of sleep”. She uses dogs to represent each of them, placing a wall, a clock and next to a swing – all represent the causes of delay in work.
The artist uses a pen to attract motion, an artwork with horses, as they appeared during a dream. Unable to find out where they came from or where they went from, the work affects the animal’s reluctance to clarify an objective, ambition or destiny.
View from the lines of flight | Photo Credit: Nainu Oman
She says that Anu also questions the reality of her dreams. “When you have episodes of psychosis, you forget a lot of things, you are real and unable to differentiate between what is not,” Anu says.
She also shows two sculptures in the exhibition. There is a wooden elephant, which is seen with Bindis. “Everything I have dots, so I thought why not for this,” Anu says. The sitting artist, an installation made of medicine strips, is an self-replication-in cases of plastic, the bullets were consumed by the artist herself. “This is a statement of success about a trip that I passed,” Anu says.
Sitting artists, a sculpture made of drug strips on the lines of flight. Photo Credit: Nainu Oman
Artist says, “Many people are associated with the exhibition; some of them have issues of mental health or know those who are passing by him. It is still a taboo subject in Kerala and not easy to accept. However, things are getting better.”
The line of Anu Kalikal flight is till 10 October.
Published – 01 October, 2025 11:11 AM IST