Paintings by Neogene on the "Spirit of Sharmila" was first presented to the Manipuri public during the festival of Hope, Justice and Peace organized by the Just Peace Foundation in November 2010, during the completion of ten years of Hunger-fast by Irom Sharmila Chanu in her fight to remove AFSPA, 1958 from North East India.
The NEO-GENE ( a new generation of contemporary artists ) was established in the year 1997 in the midst of tumultuous crises in the lives of the Manipur people, where there were feverish resistance against the onslaught of global capital and post-colonial repression by the corporate state to appropriate cultures and identities of the emerging peoples of North East India. Interiorizing the painful experience of victimhood which were forced upon a once proud tradition, these group of artists began the sensing of the genuine need to explore the aspirations and hopes of the new generation, who had inherited the tumult and thus born a wave of artistic expression, silent yet defiant of hegemony. Individual imageries are now welded into a collective of democratic resistance with a vision of their own reflecting the universal humanism of a freer world. .
Read all about Irom Sharmila struggle here
Picture Credit :: Neogene - a new generation of contemporary artists