The body as canvas

Conceptual artists are using performance to create unsettling and thought-provoking experiences, often involving the viewer as a collaborator in the art piece

- Avantika Bhuyan

Last weekend, a group of people were blindfolded and led through a path littered with obstacles while a narrator offered mysterious commentary like "If you speak plainly, you are punished" and "If you are dangerous and ask why, you are punished".

Mithu Sen's "trickster performance", What Do Birds Dream at Dusk, cleverly turned the viewers into part of the artwork even as she showed how curated truths and collective denial shape society today.

Though Sen was physically absent from the location, Mumbai's Chemould Prescott Road gallery, she was omnipresent in the orchestration of this metaphorical tussle between sight and blindness, control and freedom, reality and perception. Sen calls this the "poetics of instruction and choreography of control", where the performer's invisible body or deliberate absence still directs the audience's mind. The visitors are split into two groups of the blindfolded and the witnesses, thereby creating a tension where behaviour, vulnerability and power circulate unpredictably. "Performance becomes a site where viewers confront strangeness because my medium itself is the act of Un-ing: undoing, unravelling, unsettling," she says.

Meanwhile, at Aspinwall House in Kochi, a different kind of performance has been playing out. For the duration of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Berlin-based artist Anja Ibsch has been occupying different parts of the space for her shifting piece, Still. Visitors can observe the artist going about her work, rearranging objects and photos to create temporary installations. She works with locally sourced objects, cutouts from medical books and photos from older performances. The arrangement changes every day as a comment on the transient nature of life and memory itself.