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Santosh Korthiwada, “Missing Motherland,” 2023, digital print, 30" x 22" (courtesy of Art Gallery of St. Albert)

Artist and photographer Santosh Korthiwada arrived in Canada in 2018 during the last days of summer. He left the clamour, scents and sounds of Hyderabad, a city located in south-central India, to begin a new life. He first settled in Edmonton’s downtown, which seemed eerily subdued. Soon winter arrived and even the muted greys and ochres of the city turned into shades of white. 

On his daily commute to a retail job, Korthiwada gazed at this pale new world through a bus window. Lost in reverie, he imagined that familiar street vendors or temples were just around the corner. It was as if the scenes from his travels in India shooting street photographs were imprinted onto the present moment.

His digital collage, Missing Motherland, illustrates this haunting experience. It depicts an Edmonton residential street that Korthiwada shot one morning on his way to work. As if by magic, the empty and snow-covered neighbourhood comes alive with children, fruit vendors and women whose saris glow in the vibrant southern light. This is one of the five works featured in the staircase exhibition, Inseparable Fragments, on view at the Art Gallery of St. Albert from Feb. 6 to May 4. 

Korthiwada’s series is as much a labour of love as necessity. After leaving a senior management job in India to get a master’s degree in photography from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and then relocating to Canada, he was broke. Art would have to wait. There wasn’t an hour to spare. Putting food on the table came first.

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Santosh Korthiwada, “Ghats of Benaras,” 2023, digital print, 19" x 26" (courtesy of Art Gallery of St. Albert)

But one night, while his family was tucked away in bed, Korthiwada opened a blank canvas in Photoshop. “I started reaching into both these worlds that are in me right now,” he says with a ring of euphoria. “I started feeling as if a certain weight on my shoulders started dropping.”

He can’t recall which collage he began that night but says it was likely the Ghats of Benaras, assembled from his shots of the holiest of the seven sacred cities in Hinduism. As he walked the streets of this spiritual metropolis, Korthiwada was struck by a fearsome mural of the major Hindu goddess Kali. Beneath her feet lay the decapitated head of a demon. “Kali is a dark goddess but she is the mother of wisdom and enlightenment,” he says. “With her blessing, she will decapitate your ego.” 

A fragment of the severed head peeks from behind a fruit stand and forms the focal point of Korthiwada’s composition – her white bindi (the coloured dot on her forehead) is in the dead centre. Her startled eyes stare at the viewer. Only one person in the image stares back at her: a boy located in the bottom left corner of the image. He is dressed in white (a colour associated with sadhus and the renunciation of worldly possessions) and is partly submerged in the river Ganges. As in each of the collages in this show, the boy lost in contemplation, peeking through a mirror, or looking at the scene from the vantage point of a viewer, represents the artist.

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Santosh Korthiwada, “The Taj Mahal Search,” 2023, digital print, 22" x 33" (courtesy of Art Gallery of St. Albert)

Standing at the feet of Kali was cathartic for Korthiwada. It was at that mural in Banaras, over a decade ago, that he decided to become an artist. What followed was gruelling. He gave up his profitable career and soon ran out of savings. He also faced vicious criticism. Korthiwada still smarts from the comments he received from renowned photographers in India who said that he would never succeed.

Now his current job as a retail manager in Calgary doesn’t give him much spare time. But Korthiwada is determined to make art. “It would completely destroy me if I don’t do it,” he says. He lives for the late nights at his computer screen and the rollercoaster ride of memories that his collages bring. ■

Inseparable Fragments is on view now at the Art Gallery of St. Albert, Alta., until May 4, 2024.

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