In Rewati Shahani’s work, body as a rebuke to politics of othering

The title of Rewati Shahani’s exhibition, ‘I am your neighbour, I am your lover, I am’, sounds almost tender until you know where it came from. “I am your neighbour,” Shahani says, “is a response to the anti-immigration rhetoric, specifically challenging the ‘not my neighbour’ slogan deployed by the far-right in the UK.” Her answer is: “I am here, we are here.”

The works, she adds, centre on the body as a physical rebuke to othering and division. “The world is obsessed with bodies, and with borders. I want to challenge that homogeny.”

The exhibition at Blueprint12 in Delhi, on till September 12, comes out of the resurgence of right-wing politics in Britain and elsewhere. Shahani, however, is looking beyond one country or moment, at what happens when people are marked as ‘outsiders’, dissent becomes precarious and exclusion enters everyday life.

Daughter of avant-garde filmmaker Kumar Shahani, the artist is now based in London. She first trained in political science before studying at the Slade School of Fine Art and Central Saint Martins. Her practice straddles drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture and performance, returning to identity, memory, collective action, belonging and the politics of being present.

The sculptural heads, several from the ‘Aghast’ series, are among the show’s most immediate works. Small, individual faces, they begin to feel like a crowd. One is dark and highly glazed, another pale and roughly worked; another is cracked across the face. Some appear bruised, strained or caught in anguish.

They carry the energy of public protest and its fatigue. When the same battles recur, demonstrations can feel repetitive, even futile. Shahani is also interested in what survives that exhaustion: people who continue to gather, speak and stand beside one another. The heads hold both individual anguish and the stubborn force of collective presence.

Shahani often begins with a concept and lets the medium follow: “Sometimes it’s just as intuitive as I’m making it.” Clay appeals to her because of its physicality. “What I have loved about working with clay in recent years is how tactile it is,” she says. “You really get into it and feel it, in a way one is slightly removed with 2D work.” Its marks, cracks and uneven surfaces remain visible; the faces look handled rather than polished.

Her body prints make presence more direct, registering the trace of her own body on paper. Deeksha Nath places them in conversation with earlier experiments by artists like Yves Klein and Chila Kumari Burman, while noting Shahani’s different register. Here the body becomes proof of persistence and agency.

There is vulnerability in that, too. Visibility can also mean exposure. When dissent carries consequences, putting the body forward becomes an assertion, a decision not to disappear. The works also have a feminist position in which personal strength grows through collective consciousness: the individual body matters, but so does the group around it.

Memory is central to Shahani’s practice. “History after all is really how we choose to remember it,” she says, pointing out that the West often remembers the 20th century very differently from people elsewhere. “I think this has an impact on my practice.”

Home is equally unsettled. Having lived and worked between places, Shahani describes it as increasingly complex, abstract and fragile. Migration and political extremism have made movement and belonging still more loaded. One image steadies her: the horizon. “There will always be something beyond the farthest one can see, and that yearning will never go,” she says.

The words “neighbour” and “lover” bring these questions back to ordinary relationships. A neighbour is simply someone who lives beside us. “We do live beside and with each other.” “Lover” moves towards intimacy and connection. “We are getting so disconnected as societies and, I feel, losing basic humanity. It’s crucial that we embrace and maintain our physical connections and use our human intelligence to interact with one another,” Shahani says.

For Blueprint12’s Mandira Lamba, this mix of vulnerability and resistance is what makes the work compelling. She was drawn especially to Shahani’s use of her body “as both a medium and a kind of evidence of being present, of refusing to disappear”. Though the immediate context is Britain, Lamba sees its questions of visibility, exclusion, dissent and solidarity resonating in Delhi.

The exhibition finally asks what art can do in a politically uncertain time. Shahani does not pretend it can fix the conditions it responds to. It can, however, record them, make them harder to ignore and keep open a space for resistance, vulnerability and solidarity. Sometimes that begins with: “I am here. We are here.”

— Quadri writes on art and culture