Meera Devidayal graduated with English Literature from Loreto House, Kolkata in 1966, and moved to Mumbai in 1967. She attended JJ School of Art for three years, and had her first exhibition in 1975.
Her early work took a humorous look at everyday life, blurring the boundaries between the sacred and profane.
The city throws up images which provide the starting point of the stories she creates, using references from newspapers, film posters, photos, stickers and so on. Her materials range from conventional ones to hologram film, recycled metal sheets, video, and even a real taxi door!
Whether it is about the migrant who is lured by the neon lights without seeing its swampy underbelly (Where I Live, 2005, Tum Kab Aaoge, 2009), the brochures that advertise ‘Dream Homes’, or the mighty stone buildings of the mills turning to glitzy malls (A Terrible Beauty, 2009), or the network of flyovers which hide the fact that hundreds of women still have to walk difficult terrain to fetch water from dried-up wells, she attempts to turn the ‘found image’ into a visual metaphor, charged with new meaning, to prod the viewer into seeing something they normally see in a different way.