Siji Krishnan: ‘The Secret Place’

October 16, 2025, 3:30 p.m.-5 p.m. EDT

Eggers Hall, 341

The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents artist Siji Krishnan from Kochi, India.

Siji Krishnan’s paintings invite viewers into a world where memory, myth and daily life intertwine. Working primarily on delicate rice paper, she builds up translucent layers of watercolor and oil to reveal figures, landscapes and hidden details. Her images often feel dreamlike—ponds shimmering with light, grasses bending in the rain or figures dissolving into their surroundings—suggesting the ways that identity, home and belonging are shaped by both what we see and what lies beneath the surface.

Her current exhibition, The Secret Place (San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, California), brings together recent works from Krishnan’s Los Angeles debut alongside five new large paintings created in her studio in Kerala, India. In these new works, Krishnan replaces her more figurative elements with water, plants and sky. The natural world of her home—backwaters, monsoon rains and village ponds—becomes a central motif, a site of both refuge and transformation. Themes of fertility and motherhood, community, and renewal flow through her practice, informed by her experiences of raising a child and the shifting boundaries between self and environment.

Krishnan’s art asks us to look slowly and closely. Small details emerge—an animal, a flower petal, a shadow of a figure—like secrets discovered over time. Both intimate and expansive, her paintings transcend cultural and geographic boundaries. In this session, Siji will talk about her process of painting and the themes she explores in her works.

Siji Krishnan is an artist based in Kochi, India. In 2024, Krishnan opened her first solo exhibition at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been collected by numerous public institutions throughout the world including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India, among others.

In 2019, Krishnan was an artist-in-residence at Koganecho Art Center in Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan. Most recently, Krishnan has exhibited work in the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial, the Moscow Biennale of International Contemporary Art, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, as well as solo exhibitions at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai

Type

Talks

Region

Campus

Open to

All Students

Faculty and Staff

General Public

Organizers

South Asia Center, Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs

Contact

Matt Baxter
315.443.2553

mhbaxter@syr.edu

Accessibility

Contact Matt Baxter to request accommodations