Satyabhama Majhi: Painting the Un-Urbanisation of the City and the Soul of Dongria Life
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The Bhubaneswar artist who grinds Niyamgiri soil into colour, making memory itself her medium
Bhubaneswar, Sept 8, 2026: To understand Satyabhama Majhi's art, you have to stand in two places at once. In a noisy, vanishing market lane of Bhubaneswar, and on a quiet, misty slope of the Niyamgiri hills where a Dongria Kondh woman draws a triangle on her wall with geru soil.
Majhi is an Indian contemporary visual artist, curator, social activist, community practitioner and Secretary of Sasatwa Foundation, based in Bhubaneswar. For over two decades, her practice has refused to stay inside a gallery. She works across painting, sculpture, installation, photography, mixed media and public art - but her real canvas is life itself.
Concept 1: Un-Urbanisation - The City Remembering Itself
Majhi calls one of her core explorations Un-Urbanisation.
Growing up around her father's small shop in a Bhubaneswar marketplace, she watched the city not as buildings and roads, but as relationships - vendors, customers, children, festivals, stray dogs, gossip.
As Bhubaneswar became a smart city, she saw its old neighbourhoods, its shared spaces, its slow life being erased. Her city paintings are not beautiful skylines. They are crowded, layered, almost chaotic archives of what modernisation deletes. She paints what she calls the "psychology of a place" - where memory lives in a tea stall that no longer exists.
In Un-Urbanisation, she reverses development. She brings the village, the animal, the tree, the festival back into the concrete frame, asking: what if the city remembered how to be a village?
Concept 2: Dongria Life as Nature, Not Separate From It
The second pillar of her work is her 12+ years of sustained engagement with the Dongaria Kondh community of Niyamgiri.
This is not tribal art documentation. Majhi lived the up-and-down of Niyamgiri - literally. She watched people climb uphill for water, downhill for the market, uphill again for worship of Niyam Raja. That daily rhythm became her philosophical motif: "Up and Down" - a metaphor for resilience, for life's constant negotiation with landscape.
From Dongaria visual culture she adopted the Triangle - the sacred form of the Niyamgiri mountain itself - as a symbol of stability, divinity and sacred geography.
Most radically, she changed her material. Learning from their wall traditions, she stopped buying colours and started making them from the hill: chalk stone for white, charcoal for black, turmeric for yellow, geru soil for red, brown stone for earth. Her pigment is the place. The landscape literally becomes the painting.
For Dongria, nature is not a resource. It is home, god, and kin. Majhi paints that worldview - where man does not dominate nature, he belongs to it.
From Cuttack Walls to Parliament
Majhi believes art must meet people. Her public murals - at Ring Road and Dagabara Sahi in Cuttack, and for the Men's FIH Hockey World Cup and Asian Athletics meets in Bhubaneswar - turned public walls into public memory.
Her projects Pago_ and _Thought Loom are community dialogues.
In 2023, she was invited as Co-Sutradhar and creative contributor for People's Wall – Jan, Janani and Janmabhumi, the monumental participatory art project for the New Parliament House in New Delhi by Lalit Kala Akademi, where she worked alongside women artists and artisans from across India.
The Teacher: Don't Copy, Remember
For 15 years, Majhi has worked as an art educator with children, including tribal residential schools and children with disabilities, through Kalpanadham, Gram Vikas and Tata Trusts.
Her instruction is simple and radical: "Don't copy an image from a book. Draw your house, your tree, your mother's kitchen, your festival." She teaches children to source creativity from their own memory, not imitation.
The Artist's Journey
An M.F.A. in Traditional Art by training, Majhi has shown and worked at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal; Nature Morte, Gurgaon; Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi; Odisha Lalit Kala Akademi; Bhubaneswar Art Trail; Gram Art Project; and Vancouver Biennale-linked projects.
She is a recipient of the Odisha Lalit Kala Akademi State Award (2012) and the National Lalit Kala Akademi Scholarship (2009-2010).
Her current ongoing solo exhibition, 'Land as Memory, Matter as Landscape' at artCENTRIX Space Gallery, New Delhi, brings both her concepts together - one room holds the un-urbanising city, the other holds the breathing Niyamgiri hills.
Satyabhama Majhi's art finally says this: Soil is not just colour, it is memory. Land is not just property, it is identity. And whether it is a city forgetting its lanes or a hill community defending its god, the fight is the same - to keep memory alive.
Website : https://satyabhamamajhi.in/
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