Aparna Ashok

Some ruins do not collapse. They settle into the body. ‘The Stillness We Carry’ wanders through the abandoned corridors of Alamparai Fort, where the sea presses endlessly against walls built by vanished empires. Here, history lingers like humidity. Heavy. Intimate. Difficult to escape. The film moves through inherited silences, rehearsed obedience, and the strange tenderness of carrying roles that were chosen long before we arrived. A body learning how to endure. A body learning how to disappear without leaving. What survives after generations of expectation? What parts of ourselves are buried quietly beneath duty, ritual, performance? Between crumbling stone, open sky, and the weight of repetition, The Stillness We Carry sits inside the fragile space where restraint and resistance begin to resemble one another. The film is now available to watch on the @performanceartvideo platform. Watch here: @performanceartvideo

#ArtistOfTheMonth ▶️ WATCH ON PAV > ‘The Stillness We Carry’ by @apsi_ashok The Stillness We Carry is a performance-based film by Aparna that explores the tension between societal expectation and personal autonomy. Drawing from lived experience, the work confronts the inherited burdens of tradition, culture, and gender, asking: What does it mean to bear a legacy you did not choose? Filmed in the ruins of the 17th-century Alamparai Fort on the outskirts of Chennai, the site—once a thriving hub of empire and trade—now stands as a crumbling monument to the passage of time. This abandoned space becomes both setting and metaphor for the emotional erosion caused by generational pressure. Through its poetic structure, the film meditates on the fragility of human agency within systems of power, inviting viewers into a liminal space where restraint and resistance coexist. The Stillness We Carry offers an immersive reflection on autonomy, entrapment, and the elusive possibility of transcendence. - Reel by @juanmascia - Watch and support art! By subscribing to PAV, you gain unlimited access to performance art videos on our platform. A portion of your subscription fee will be donated to the artists. 🔗 Link in bio to subscribe! - #PerformanceArtVideo #PerformanceArt #Wetrustinchange

#ArtistOfTheMonth Thrilled to welcome the newest artist on the PAV platform: @apsi_ashok ! Aparna is a performance artist based in Chennai, India. Her work responds to the societal pressures placed on women, particularly within South Asian contexts, exploring themes of autonomy, identity, and cultural expectation. She confronts the tension between personal agency and inherited narratives. She works across performance, photography, and video, drawing from her cultural heritage and global experiences to reflect on how the body becomes a site of negotiation—between duty and desire, silence and expression. In 2024, Aparna showcased her work at the MAXXI Museum in Rome as part of RUFA University’s Summer Lab – Performing Rome, followed by the Posthuman – Body, Ecology and Technology Festival in Odisha and Body Furia Festival in Barcelona. In 2025, she was part of a performance festival with the Possible Futures Collective at the Hyderabad Literary Festival and participated in Arcane Portals, an intensive co-creation with Vest&Page, presented as part of Future Ritual: CEREMONY. Aparna holds a BA in Visual Arts from Stella Maris College, Chennai, and an MA in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art, London. Her practice continues to evolve through workshops and collaborative projects that examine the friction between tradition and agency, personal narrative and collective expectation. - Watch and support art! By subscribing to PAV, you gain unlimited access to performance art videos on our platform. A portion of your subscription fee will be donated to the artists. 🔗 Link in bio to subscribe! - #PerformanceArtVideo #PerformanceArt #Wetrustinchange

Developed during my residency at @eutopia_art_residency in Kavala, A Weight That Named Me (2025) is a durational performance where I assemble a pearl garland through repetitive labour. What begins as ornament slowly turns into a way of questioning colonial residue, inherited femininity, and the quiet commodification of identity. As I work, my body becomes both archive and vessel, carrying the visible and invisible weight embedded in objects of beauty. The piece reframes adornment as a structure of power, while holding space for endurance, visibility, and resistance. Part of my ongoing practice, this work continues my exploration of memory, inheritance, and the body as a site that refuses to stay silent. Photo credits: @danai.says.hi #InternationalPerformanceArt #BiennaleArtist #CuratorialPractice #LivePerformanceArt #performanceart

In ‘A Weight That Named Me’, a body sits and threads while a history slowly gathers form and weight. When does adornment become a shackle? When does repetition become survival? When does beauty confess its violence? Are pearls born or extracted? Is a garland an offering or a restraint? Who decides what a woman must carry to be seen as whole? What is assembled here? Ornament? Identity? Empire? Memory? And when the hands that bind are also the hands that remember, is this labour devotion, resistance, or refusal? How long does it take for silence to become visible? Photo Credits - Thank you @itsaleisharose and @danai.says.hi for being there, holding space, and helping document these precious moments. #performanceart #LiveArt #DurationalPerformance #ConceptualPerformance #contemporaryart

In ‘A Weight That Named Me’, I sat with histories I did not choose but still carry, threading pearls slowly until the act of assembly began to feel like a conversation with everything that shaped me before I had language for it. What began as a simple gesture grew heavier with time. Not just physically, but emotionally. Each pearl held questions about inheritance, beauty, labour, expectation, and the quiet ways women are taught to become ornaments for systems that never asked for our consent. During my residency at @eutopia_art_residency , I let repetition become language and slowness become resistance. I allowed my body to hold the weight long enough to understand where it belonged to me and where it did not. This work is not about decoration. It is about recognising what has already been placed upon us and asking whether we continue carrying it or begin unthreading it. #durationalperformance #performancearts #feministartist #contemporaryperformance #indianartist

Rooms, cities, landscapes in motion. Where I arrived, where I lingered, where something shifted. Traces left, traces carried. Thank you 2025 and to all the places that held me. #placesandspaces #traces #movement #artinplace #yearinreview

This year held me through moments of vulnerability, joy, challenge and growth. Every conversation, shared silence and crossing of paths shaped my journey more than I can say. Looking back, I see a year made possible by people. Grateful for the care, the presence and the ways you walked alongside me. Thank you for being part of this year— here’s to what comes next. #peopleandprocess #gratitudedaily #newyear #yearinreview #community

Objects, gestures, moments from 2025 that sparked something. Small anchors in a moving year. What I return to, again and again. #thingsiinspiredby #processnotes #objectsandideas #creativepractice #everydayinspiration yearinreview

“Red Noise Offering”, A work about the static we inherit. The noise we mistake for truth. The ceremonies that shape us long before we learn their names. What does a body do with the rituals it never chose? Where does reverence end and reclamation begin? What happens when the inherited script finally unravels? Arcane Portals: an intensive co-creation with Vest&Page, 2025. Future Ritual: CEREMONY. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou @feniakotsopoulou . #ritualart #performanceart #conceptualart #contemporaryart #indianartists

Twenty eight sheets entered my mouth as instruction. I chewed until the paper drank me dry. What appeared destructive revealed its inverse. The paper resisted. It demanded saliva, time, breath, patience. Marked with vermillion, blessed and breached, it softened slowly, grinding against the inside of my mouth. The red dissolved into spit, echoing devotion, habit, inheritance. This was not consumption. It was endurance. The paper hurt me more than I hurt it. When I finally spat it out, it felt like pulling something living from my body. What remained was no longer text, no longer script, but an organic residue. A wet relic of refusal and transformation. Inherited noise does not disappear when swallowed. It bruises. It reshapes. It leaves traces. What we cannot digest still exits us changed. ‘Red Noise Offering’, created at Arcane Portals: an intensive co-creation with Vest&Page @vestandpage , 2025 Future Ritual: CEREMONY Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou @feniakotsopoulou #art #PerformanceArt #LiveArt #ContemporaryArt #RitualPerformance

Earlier this year, I created a piece where sound became weight and silence became a door. Made inside a lineage I carry and a lineage that carries me, “Red Noise Offering”, asks what happens when tradition becomes both nourishment and burden, when devotion becomes residue, and inheritance becomes something you must swallow before you can release. It became a study in ritual as rupture, in the red that stains and the red that frees, in the cycles we can’t escape and the ones we choose to break. Some portals don’t open with keys, but with people. Endless gratitude and love to @vestandpage for unlocking this portal with me and for holding a space where risk, tenderness, and strangeness can breathe. And to my fellow participants, thank you for standing inside the noise with me, shaping what this work became simply by being there. Arcane Portals: an intensive co-creation with Vest&Page @vestandpage , 2025. Future Ritual: CEREMONY. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou @feniakotsopoulou . #RedNoiseOffering #PerformanceArt #ContemporaryArtIndia #ExperimentalArt #ArtRituals #LiveArt #VestAndPage #PerformanceCommunity #ContemporaryPerformance #ArtWorldVoices #ArtistProcess #RitualArt #ArtInLondon #FutureRituals #contemporaryartwork #artcurator #internationalartist #artgallery #indianart #indianartistscommunity #artist #female #london