The co-founder of CONA, a collaborative artist-run space, Hema Bhuta is a contemporary artist. She received a diploma in painting from the LS Raheja School of Art, Mumbai in 2003, followed by a postgraduate diploma from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda (now Vadodara).

Bhuta’s interdisciplinary practice moves across mediums and incorporates organic materials that decay overtime, such as rubber, cotton, twigs and fabric. She draws reference from everyday life, domesticity, ritual and magic, fleshing them through her ongoing engagement with nature. For instance, in her solo exhibition Subarnarekha (2017), Bhuta underscored the duality of geologies between the North-Eastern region of India and the Limousin region in France. In Encounters with Gold (2017) and From the Pile (2017), she created a mass of sculptural objects that were minimalist in scale and brought in a diffusion of themes together, ranging from histories of minerals to archeology to ethnography. In 2019, Bhuta created a multi-sensory room for Jameel Arts Centre, which was presented as a liminal space to investigate the nature of in-betweenness. The room incorporated textiles, reworked carpets, henna and spices to produce a sensorium.