The Body Speaks

Curated by Rahul Kumar, the exhibition explores the human body’s ability to convey emotions, stories, and ideas through works that present the body as a canvas, a vessel, and a voice, highlighting its complexities and vulnerabilities. Artists presented here examine the figure as an emotional landscape, aiming to reveal inner worlds through expressive forms or narratives, and to reference the role of the body in shaping identity, culture, and personal stories. They express vulnerability or strength through the body’s fragility and resilience. The body is also used as a metaphor to symbolise the universality of human experiences. 

To approach the human body in visual arts is to enter an ancient and ever-renewing conversation, a dialogue between flesh and form, between the visible outline and the invisible interiority it contains. The body is our first landscape, the terrain through which we encounter the world, and the vessel through which the world encounters us. Artists return to it not merely to depict but to decipher, to understand what it means to inhabit a body, to move through space, to desire, to ache, to age, to transform. In every gesture, the body holds memory. Every contour carries the imprint of time, labour, joy, and grief. An artist listens to these traces, translating them into line, shadow, and texture. In this act of observation, the body becomes more than its anatomy; it becomes a metaphor for vulnerability, resilience, longing, and the fragile boundary between self and other.

Across centuries, the body has been celebrated, idealised, scrutinised, abstracted, broken apart, and rebuilt. Yet its mystery remains intact. Even in its simplest forms, a curve of a shoulder, the turn of a neck, it offers an entire universe of emotion. To study the body is to study humanity itself: its contradictions, its tenderness, its complications. In contemporary practice, the body expands further. It becomes political, technological, hybrid, fragmented, or fluid. It becomes a site of questioning – what does it mean to belong? To be seen? To be free?

Participating Artists:

Badush Babu, Deepanjali Shekhar, Indu Antony, Isha Sharma Haritash, Rinku Choudhary