The Body Politic | Curated by Riya Kumar

Cities can be imagined as spaces of shelter and belonging. They offer livelihood and a degree of protection. Yet, the structures that offer safety have also turned into sites of surveillance and violence. The Body Politic explores works by artists responding to turbulent cityscapes with work that highlights injustice and serves as a site of protest and resistance.

Artistic practices contest forms of urbanisation and power that are built on extraction, displacing individuals and communities. What, then, is to be made of those who transgress? In these razed landscapes, a performance begins to take place, where bodies claim contested ground. Where the figure is absent or fragmented, its traces remain. The body marks its place through omission.

For some artists, the personal offers a starting point into collective experiences. Skin, a marker of difference, absorbs the weight of history and identity. Shaped by geography and power, the body becomes a site where individual or state-led apparatuses of violence are made visible. While it may bear these marks, it does not remain silent. Art here does not merely document our time. It raises questions and demands answers from us.

Riya Kumar