Shoili Kanungo is an Indian-Australian artist presently based in New Delhi, where she grew up in a liberal Hindu-Catholic family from Bengal and Tamil Nadu.
Shoili started publishing short comics based on her dreams and experiences, the first ‘Black Panther and Little Fish’ was published in the Indian Quarterly magazine in 2014. She went on to collaborate with American artist Heather Dewey Hagborg as part of the Thoughtworks Arts Residency where they made a non fiction comic about US whistle blower Chelsea Manning. This work was shown at the Fridman Gallery in New York in 2016.
Shoili loves the act of drawing and writing on the go, and in her observational drawing diaries she tries to capture the essence of a moment almost at the same speed at which it is being observed, a habit that she developed while observing calligraphy artists at work in Tokyo, where she spent a year as an exchange student in 2001. Her field notes from Johannesburg were translated into a comic as part of the FICA InCube Art Residency in 2022.
In contrast to consciously observing the world outside and within, she is also a conduit for subconscious forms that demand to be released. She believes that these forms belong to the collective consciousness and have stories and messages for everyone.
Her works have been shown in spaces such as The Fumetto Festival in 2019, as part of the group show Mytholithics: Graphic Art from India; And then in 2021 at the Kerry Packer Gallery in Adelaide as part of the Sanaa Festival, where her works about what Home meant to her during the pandemic, were formally sold within the gallery space for the first time. She was also part of the group show All Together Now, in 2024 shown at the India International Centre in New Delhi.
Shoili is inspired by everything. Snippets caught from Instagram stories, city walks, quantum physics, cosmology, mythology, Jung’s ideas about archetypes, our emotional lives, and the enchanting dullness of everyday. The personal, the political, the subconscious world of forms, they mingle.
Sometimes, I am a conduit for forms that demand to be released onto my page. Who are these strange characters and what stories and messages do they want to reveal to the world? Sometimes when I draw, I feel like I am creating and solving a strange puzzle.
Shoili Kanungo 