Swati Kumari

Let’s start again

Today we are featuring the work of Swati Kumari @eroded_ways — To create these works, Swati Kumari traced her mother’s and grandmother’s resting bodies onto a bedsheet. The soft sculptures spread across the floor beside the bedsheet emerged out of the shapes of those bodies. You are welcome to lay down on them. Reflecting the intimacy of personal and familial bonds, this work foregrounds the comfort and stillness one seeks with loved ones. At the same time, it is an (inevitably failed) attempt to draw bodily boundaries, which thus blurs the line between what can and cannot be touched. Scan the QR code to hear from Gauri, a student of OP Jindal University in Delhi.

Happy to be part of the show Curated and co-curated exhibition by Achia Anzi @achiaanzi and Oorja Garg @oorjag ‘On Absense’ experiments with the impossible task of displaying nothingness and the political possibilities opened up by the art of concealment. To display absence is not only impossible but also counterintuitive, as art, at least in its current form, engages with showing, unfolding, and revealing. The works in this exhibition explore themes specific to the South Asian experience, including the politics of caste, the legacies of colonialism, the intergenerational impact of partition, gaps in the historical record, and pervasive histories of communal violence. The exhibition assembles the works of artists — including Payal Arya, Yogesh Barve, Sonam Chaturvedi, Priyanka D’Souza, Priyesh Gothwal, Priyank Gothwal, Shilpa Gupta, Rahul Juneja, Shaurya Kumar, Swati Kumari, Raqs Media Collective, and Mohit Shelare. ‘On Absence’ November 13th, 2025 - February 13th, 2026 Opening reception Thursday, November 13th, 2025 from 5pm - 7:30pm Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery @shivagallery.art 860, 11th Ave, New York John Jay College of Criminal Justice P.S.- thank you @macushla_r on many levels to put everything together.

The recent Peer Pollinations session with @shrutisarkar94 @poonamfound @eroded_ways on 10 Oct, prompted many stimulating conversations around the scope of an art practice, artist's life, practice and job feeding into one another, the peripheries of a medium, insecurities and vulnerabilities that we as artists share today, restricted mobilities through borders and the desire to connect with the others, negotiations between the pace of practice vis-à-vis the speed of a changing world.. The artists created a hybrid informal display of books, drawings, archival objects, alongside the presentation, reading of a travelogue> trip to Pakistan>> interactive gestures, drafts of ideas, and more! Images: @maithilibavkar @streetdog0506 🤍

Join us for the session on Friday, 10 Oct 2025, where the artists ~ @poonamfound @eroded_ways @shrutisarkar94 ~ will be sharing their practices. Dm to join. -- About//// Shruti Sarkar is a visual art practitioner and educator based in Delhi-NCR. Her research explores images of violence, spectatorship, and the management of bodies in a bio-political world. Her work entails archiving, walking, and documenting "uncared" city spaces and their inhabitants, challenging state-curated history. She teaches at Sushant University and curates for Half Walks. Poonam Jain (b.1989) is an artist based in Mumbai. She works with drawing, installation, text, and gestural works to foreground language and numbers as common denominators between divergent fields of pedagogy, economy and architecture. In her practice, she examines forms of counting in religion, politics, economics, and domestic settings, blurring the lines between these notional spaces to understand the micro-narrative formed by language. Swati Kumari is a visual practitioner based in Ghaziabad, India. She works across mediums such as drawings through carbon paper, soft sculptures, video, installations, letters, and books, she aims to trace the trajectory of generational tiredness in/of women’s bodies. Through her practice, she prompts and allows viewers to participate and activate the work by sitting, lying, resting, and conversing over it. Alongside, her artist books bring forth an intuitive response to her memories, surroundings, and situations located within the urban landscape. -- `Peer Pollinations` is a desire for an artist-run peer-led space in Delhi where peers, engaged in creative practice+research in the arts, can come together-- to share practice and ideas in the dual framework of an informal display + presentation of previous/ ongoing/ future ideas; to have a space for feedback, conversations and constructive critique amongst peers; to engage with ongoing practices and research happening in/around the field of visual arts in India; to uphold spaces of artistic exchange and transmission through collaboration, rhizomatic approaches, radical solidarity, self-organisation and resource redistribution.

Taking a moment to express my gratitude for receiving Prince Clause Seed Award 2025. Thank you @princeclausfund for holding practices and extending your support. And many thanks to those who know without them I wouldn’t even submitted my application. #princeclausefund #seedaward

And somehow I don’t know why I didn’t post this picture of us @koshywada For just being happy and at peace near the sea.

Round 9 | With the support of the Generator grant, Swati Kumari’s @eroded_ways project will explore generational tiredness in maternal bodies, tracing her lineage from urban Ghaziabad to ancestral villages in Bihar. Through textiles, letters, and soft sculptures, she explores rest (aaraam) and tiredness (thakaan) in women’s lives. Her installation invites reflection on unrecorded female histories, creating a rhizomatic ‘neighbourhood’ that challenges patriarchal structures and foregrounds embodied, domestic, and migratory labor. Swati Kumari’s practice explores generational tiredness and the travels of women. She makes drawings, soft sculptures, video, installations, and books in participatory settings such as reading and conversations. She is based in Uttar Pradesh, India. Image credit: Swati Kumari: Mohit Shelare [Generator, Experimenter, Experimenter Labs, artist fund, grants]

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