For many of human historical past, the physique was a non-public area owned, ruled, and understood as a person’s most private terrain. However in trendy societies, the physique has advanced into one thing much more advanced: a web site of politics, ideology, and management. Whether or not regulated by legal guidelines, surveilled by applied sciences, judged by social norms, or disciplined by state and market forces, the human physique is now deeply enmeshed in energy buildings.
This phenomenon is commonly described as physique politics. From biometric databases to city zoning legal guidelines, from gendered violence to style tendencies, the physique is consistently being formed by forces outdoors itself. We’re, fairly actually, inhabited by historical past.
This month, Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai will provide creative views on this very topic. Titled ‘The Physique Politic,’ this group exhibition will open on June 12, 2025, together with Artwork Evening Thursday, and stay on view via July 19. That includes works by Bhanu Shrivastav, Kshetrimayum Gopinath Singh, Jayanta Roy, Ritesh Ajmeri, Ritika Sharma, Salik Ansari, and Siddhartha Kararwal, the present explores how our bodies are formed (bodily, emotionally, and metaphorically) by the worlds they inhabit.
Every of the seven artists addresses this theme with their very own vocabulary of kind and metaphor. Salik Ansari captures the silence round city improvement. In his work, human absence turns into a loud metaphor. His deal with development websites turns into a proxy for tales of displacement, exclusion, and erasure.
“In the meantime, Kshetrimayum Gopinath Singh engages with the historical past of violence in Manipur, rendering landscapes stripped of human figures, but soaked in human trauma. In these eerie, quiet compositions, the land itself turns into the wounded physique. The place Singh turns to geography, Ritesh Ajmeri turns inward. His tactile works evoke pores and skin suggesting that reminiscence, violence, and resistance can all reside in essentially the most intimate floor of the human expertise,” says curator Riya Kumar. In Ritika Sharma’s work, the physique turns into a topic of management. She makes use of stills from CCTV footage and crime reportage to ask: What does it imply to maneuver via public area when each step is being watched? Is surveillance a defend or a sword?
Garland by Ritesh Ajmeri (Courtesy Sakshi Gallery)
Resistance, nonetheless, is available in many kinds. Siddhartha Kararwal’s sculptures and installations use humour and pop-cultural mash-ups to satirise energy and its blind spots. Bhanu Shrivastav, via photo-performance, places her physique immediately in threatened landscapes, turning artwork into an act of embodied resistance. Jayanta Roy appears at violence that hides in plain sight; layering acquainted city objects to reveal programs of coercion hidden beneath on a regular basis life.
Bridging the Divide by Bhanu Shrivastav (Courtesy Sakshi Gallery)
“Collectively, these works suggest a haunting and crucial thesis: that our our bodies are archives of public coverage, social reminiscence, environmental change, and political want. Most significantly, they’re additionally devices of resistance,” says Kumar.
Sakshi Gallery, over its four-decade journey, has been a platform for such questions. From its early champions of Indian modernism (Jehangir Sabavala, Manjit Bawa, Rekha Rodwittiya, amongst others) to its modern imaginative and prescient, the gallery continues to ask: What function does artwork play in how we perceive ourselves?
‘The Physique Politic’ is on view from June 12 – July 19, 2025 at Sakshi Gallery, third Pasta Lane, Colaba, Mumbai
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