Writing Initiatives

The exchange is embarrassingly ordinary. A brief act of description dissolves the ambiguity; a title, a few words from the artist, and the artwork folds into meaning. Yet that moment foregrounds a question that has hovered over decades of art and literary criticism: what authority should be granted to the artist’s intention, and what remains the critic’s to produce? It is as quickly resolved as it emerges, deftly absorbed into familiar theoretical vocabulary. Perhaps the imagined drain is a “punctum,” an unintended detail that arrested my attention despite lying outside the artist’s intention. Or maybe it simply affirms Barthes’ well-known decentring of the author, where meaning is constituted in the encounter between text and reader rather than hinged to the point of creation.

The essay is concerned with a different, and comparatively underexamined, condition that shapes contemporary art writing: distance. Not the distance between artwork and viewer, as discussed, but the mediated, temporal, institutional, and technological distances through which artworks are now encountered, interpreted, and circulated. Before the question of what an artwork means lies another: from where, and through what conditions, does it become available in the first place? 

As a writer, I have written more than a dozen exhibition reviews for Musée Magazine, often without being physically present at the exhibition; my engagement was, instead, mediated through press kits, exhibition catalogues, and installation photographs. In an era where exhibitions increasingly privilege immersion and scale, this absence looms like a deficit. How does one write about the ephemerality of a performance or the affective charge of proximity through a flat screen?

The personal reflection coalesces into what I like to call the paradox of distance: while physical absence purports to diminish perspective, it often compels the critic to attend more intimately to textures and curatorial decisions. Since what is at stake is tridimensionality, I turn to two specific exhibitions whose very conception rest on these apprehensions. 

 Lived In Skin: Textile as Armour as Memory, a group exhibition presented at Latitude 28, featuring works by Sabeen Omar, Meenakshi Nihalani, and Anshu Singh, approaches textile as a repository of memory, labor, and inheritance. Fabric is treated as something lived with, carrying within its folds the traces of bodies and the weight of everyday life. On a cursory glance, the exhibition’s bent on tactility tends to resist mediation, making it a fertile site through which to test the limits, and possibilities, of writing at a distance.

Air-India New York, S. N. Surti, 1967. The Maharaja, dressed up as a Playboy Bunny and serving drinks to Hugh Hefner in New York, is one of 191 posters catalogued in Air-India’s Rogue’s Gallery (1977). The cosmpolitan Maharaja context-switches seamlessly and is described by the airline’s publicity department as “conceived by Bobby Kooka, delivered by Umesh Rao, raised by Jal B. Cowasji, adopted by the world.”

The Indian music press, it seems, does not know whose taste it has borrowed. Taste arrives through osmosis and then solidifies into something like instinct.  It’s like that moment at a dinner party when someone says something strange and you glance at your bestie or someone with the right kind of power in the room for clues about how to arrange your face.

Once a framework for evaluating music becomes invisible, it just feels natural, and this is when it feels like it is yours. I’m not suggesting that one walk through life constantly holding the genealogy of their aesthetic judgements at hand, I just want to notice how, when we stop noticing entirely where our musical standards are coming from, then our tastes, inherited through choice or circumstance just feel like our own perception.

In my practice-based research into feminist resistances captured through moving image technologies, I work with lost archival footage of the choreographer/dancer Chandralekha and her radical reframing of the gesture of Namaskar within the repertoires of classical Indian dance. Traditionally, the gesture of Namaskar represents the subjugation of the female corpus within Brahminical patriarchy, it inscribes a devotional submissiveness, as docile bodies bending before religious scripts, and divine ordinances. Chandralekha reverses the traditional Namaskar by combining it with Ashtanga yoga and other martial arts. The revised Namaskar is a Virbhadrasana (Warrior Pose) combined with Hastauttarasana (Raised Arm Backbend Pose). The use of martial traditions results in a geometry that emphasises grounding and elevation at the same time, as figures press down firmly into the earth and the spine reaches upward in a gesture of resistance. The repurposed VHS footage is one of the only recordings of Chandralekha that shows her explaining her radical feminist interventions in classical Indian dance from SPACES, an alternative dance school she set up in Chennai. How does one write about this gesture that was not meant to be archived?

In the film, haptic analogue visuals and the interplay between still and moving images draw attention to a form of gestural cinema. I approach the found footage not simply as an archival document, but as the remnant of a gesture: a composite unit of embodied movement that records a form of feminist resistance in the process of disappearing. As a film theorist and practitioner who has worked closely with this archival material, I am interested in what art writing might do that documentation cannot. How might reflection and critique hold the textures of a body in motion, the choreographed politics of refusal, and the afterlife of an act of embodied feminist resistance?

My essay therefore asks: what forms, structures, and languages might critical writing develop in order to reflect on embodied practices that resist capture by structures of power? In the context of postcolonial India, how might art writing become a praxis of world-making rather than merely descriptive or paranoid interpretation. In order to respond to these questions, I look at the political conditions that shape the production of embodied feminist performance as well as forces of resistance emerging from absence, erasures, and contingencies of the archive. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay, “You Are So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You”, proposes an alternative to paranoid modes of reading that have shaped much twentieth-century critical thought through the intellectual legacies of Freud, Foucault, and Marx. Rather than privileging revelation, suspicion, and the exposure of hidden structures, Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading attends to affect, touch, and texture as forms of knowledge that emerge through embodied encounters with an artwork.

I understand the haptic image as a visual counterpart to this reparative mode of reading. Haptic images invite audiences to engage as embodied and sensory participants rather than detached observers. They challenge ocularcentric regimes of spectatorship by foregrounding proximity, tactility, texture, and affect. In this sense, I propose that art writing as an embodied feminist practice might similarly attend to what is felt, sensed, and encountered in an artwork, rather than only to what can be revealed, decoded, or exposed. To write about embodied feminist resistance, then, is also to develop a language capable of attending to textures.

Shanta Rao, one of India’s most influential classical dancers of the twentieth century, spent much of her career fending off strong opinions about how classical dance ought to look. Trained in forms including Kathakali, Bharatanatyam and Mohiniyattam, she often found herself at odds with critics who preferred clearer boundaries between traditions. When she made her Bharatanatyam debut at the Music Academy in Madras in 1942, reviewers dismissed her dancing as “stiff,” “exaggerated” and “rather masculine,” arguing that traces of Kathakali had seeped too visibly into her performance.

Then something unexpected happened.

The British dance critic Arnold Haskell saw Rao perform and described her as “a dancer of genius.” His words did more than praise her. They offered a counter narrative, inviting audiences to see her work with fresh eyes.

I often return to this story because it reminds me that performance histories are shaped not only by what happens on stage but also by the people who write about them. A performance is fleeting by nature. It disappears the moment it is over. What remains are conversations, reviews, photographs, documentation, memories and rumours. Writing, then, becomes one of the ways a work continues to live.

Yet, writing on performance often finds itself caught between a few familiar positions: the harsh review, the detached journalistic blurb, or the diplomatic insider response. More often than not, the critic writes from outside performance practice, becoming a kind of referee who decides what counts and what does not.

Performers rarely don the garb of a critic with confidence. To write critically about one’s peers or seniors is a precarious undertaking. We are entangled in the same artistic communities, sharing stages, festivals, friendships and futures. Direct criticism can feel risky. Silence often feels safer.

So, I find myself asking a different question: what if criticism did not begin with judgment? What if it could be a way of noticing what stays with us through ideas, images and sensations that continue to resonate long after the performance has ended. What if criticism could generate new ways of seeing, and perhaps even new works of art?

The fire died down. People moved on. Benefitting from the social popularity of the themes of ‘Dada’ and ‘Animal farm’4, the exhibition note wants to access the political weightage of these words without actually practicing them. As Neofetou notes, political art criticism that restricts itself to formal or thematic analysis tends to dissolve the particularities of how works are produced and circulated, turning politics into content rather than relation (Neofetou 2021). When dealing with artworks which are termed ‘political’, we often feel the violence is always what the piece is talking about and not what it itself has been perpetuating. The usage of Aziz’s poem without giving him the credit was an issue, but the material of the artworks and the space they were displayed in were for a certain class and not for the marginalised for whom Aziz writes (Bhasthi 2025). This is not an isolated tension. Writing on Dalit art in Indian exhibitions, Aarushi Punia shows how institutions often celebrate “marginalised” work while quietly stripping it of its political and caste‑marked force, keeping structural hierarchies intact (Punia 2025). The questions asked by him should belong in the criticism of an exhibition reviewer. By not addressing these issues, the writer and the publications both become irrelevant in the larger scheme of art world. From the captions of the artworks to the gallery’s response, every layer worked as a gateway into a system well known for representing marginalised voices while excluding them structurally. To understand that system, we cannot look at artwork, artist and institution separately; criticism has to hold them together if it wants to engage incidents like this critically.

“Me Too” at the Biennale

In January this year, Bose Krishnamachari, co-founder of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, resigned from his roles as president and member of the board of trustees of the Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF)5. It later emerged that his resignation came in light of a sexual harassment complaint filed against him by one of the female employees6. This was not the first time the biennale had faced such allegations: in 2018, another co‑founder, Riyas Komu, stepped down from all organisational roles after accusations of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo moment7. The repetition is telling. An institution celebrated for progressive programming and public discourse around rights has, more than once, had to reckon with allegations of gendered violence from within its own workforce. Writing on the scale and significance of “India’s first and only biennale”, some coverage mentions these allegations only in passing, folded into a celebratory narrative of the institution8. McCartney shows how institutions often sustain the fiction that art and artists can be separated, even while relying on progressive rhetoric about rights and representation (McCartney 2022). In Kochi’s case, public programming around women’s rights sat uneasily alongside allegations by women workers within the same institution.