Where does the body begin? Where does the image end?
Is it the skin? Is it the frame?

The body and the image, much like the atlas, are bound by fixed coordinates and established borders, boxed within and without in conceptual frameworks that restrict their expansive possibilities. Tortured, violated, victimized, racialised, oppressed, marginalized, marked, controlled or alienated – the multiple narratives of our embodied experiences are trapped in contested cultural claims, saturated in societal restrictions, or conditioned by the institutional apparatus that foster them, foreclosing the opportunity to imagine the body as a provisional construct, shaped by shifting desires and motivated by pulsating
emotions. The body and its contours must be reimagined via a reconfiguring of its borders. A new atlas must be drawn for this purpose, an atlas of fluid shapes and porous boundaries that accommodate the desires and fantasies, and foster the vibrant flow of emotions that shape our individuality.

This exhibition is an attempt to think beyond the regulatory frameworks, and complicate our understanding of the body and its representation. It brings together diverse representational strategies, impressions and experiences about and on the body through the visual arts. Furthermore, the exhibition challenges the idea of body-mind duality and proposes an embodied experience of the body through a constellation of representations outside the ambit of the ideal, such as the disabled body, the sick body, abject body, and marginalised body. It argues that the artistic processes, especially figurative strategies, are tied to
our bodily experiences, and that these new strategies to foreground the body through a reconfigured aesthetics can be transformative.

– Premjish Achari