Richi Bhatia is a multimedia and performance artist whose work invites us to engage with liminality, challenging normative categories that shape our understanding of the world and our relationships with its human and nonhuman inhabitants.
Spanning multiple sites across India and the United Arab Emirates, her work is at once intimate and transnational. It asks us to sit uncomfortably with the deep interconnections between heritage, livelihood, home, and community-making with various forms of violence and exploitation. The ‘Antevasin’ – the one who sits at the border of two worlds – serves as a guiding figure. Through both process and form, Bhatia's work illuminates the porous, shifting boundaries between lifeworlds and deathworlds, where beauty and obscenity often coexist. The exhibition resists any single protagonist piece; instead, each unfolds layered mediations on life, death, food, species, gender, labor, and embodiment.
Bhatia’s work is quite literally grounded in her own skin: living with a visible skin condition for over a decade prompted her to reimagine her body in terms of scales, leading to an investigation of skin and scale in fish.
Bhatia’s focus on fish scales opened up a broader inquiry into the interstices between body and meat, meat and food, market and livelihood. Incorporating both ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches, she grounds much of her practice in fish and meat markets, engaging with the lives of humans and animals whose labor and bodies are entangled within the food industry.
