India, May 16 -- Bengaluru-based Sheela Gowda has used cow dung, kumkum powder, human hair and several other unusual objects, often foraged in markets and on roadsides, to create art. Her work is, in her own words, an attempt to "transform the material without changing its identity too much and weave in my own ideas in the larger sense of the work, so both of them exist side by side."

I admire how Gowda involves the viewer's physical and psychological state of being through smell, touch, memory and more. It makes for ground-breaking, provocative and thought-provoking art.

In Behold (2009), first shown at the Venice Biennale, Gowda strung together thousands of pieces of talismanic rope, made of hundreds of hair strands taken from differe...