The body as canvas: Exploring the evolution of performance art

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.

Regular visitors might feel slightly unsettled by the play between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Something seems to have moved or changed, though you can’t immediately put a finger to it. Two balloons hanging alongside a board titled “time” seem to have altered in shape. A small-scale figure of a woman makes an appearance, hanging alongside some foliage.

“I explore how embodied histories intersect with the cultural landscapes we inhabit,” says Ibsch, who has been working in the field of performance art and installation since 1993. “Art is about creating connections, fostering meaningful conversations, and embracing vulnerability—whether through the body or the stories we tell. My practice is grounded in the understanding that transformation comes not from resisting conditions, but from working with them.” In the middle of January, visitors could find her lying under a work table. The glass top featured a head, heart and spine made from everyday objects, corresponding to the body of the artist lying below—an artistic X-ray of sorts.

More traditional art enthusiasts might wonder how the act of lying under a table or standing under a balcony, unspooling fabric and wrapping it around the head over and over or walking around with a mask is an act of creativity? Turning an everyday act or a ritual on its head to create an unsettling experience—making both the artist and the viewer pause, participate and partake of that fleeting moment—is what art is all about. In the case of performance art, the artist uses their own body to create these thought-provoking experiences, sometimes involving the viewer themselves as collaborators.

Serbian artist Marina Abramović, considered synonymous with performance art, is known for “complicating the relationship between art and audience” in her pieces. Emblematic of her approach is The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as part of her retrospective in 2010. Abramovic simply sat in silence across a different visitor daily for three months. People reacted—some with solidarity, some with violence, many with tears, but all left feeling visibly moved by the viscerality of that moment. This performance has been re-enacted several times, more recently in the political arena when, ahead of his inauguration as mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani did his version of The Artist is Present. Constituents were encouraged to reserve one-on-one slots with him as part of The Mayor is Listening.

RESISTING DEFINITIONS

Even now when the discourse around this genre has evolved in South Asia, there is ambiguity about its definition. Is it dance, theatre, or something in between? What is the difference between performance and performing arts? Ushmita Sahu, director and head curator, Emami Art, says the genre resists fixed definition precisely because it operates at the edge of disciplines rather than within a single form. “While it shares the condition of ‘liveness’ with theatre, dance, or music, it is not governed by their conventions of narrative, virtuosity, or spectacle,” she says.

Unlike mainstream performing arts, which are rooted in set techniques passed down through generations and repeatable structures, performance art is driven by concept and lies in the moment. Instead of performing for an audience or within a proscenium, this genre unfolds with or in relation to the spectator. Its participatory nature is what sets it apart. “What distinguishes performance art is not the absence of skill or technique, but the way the artist’s body, actions, and lived experience become the primary site of meaning-making,” adds Sahu.

The emphasis is on encounters in real-time through attention, vulnerability, duration, and context. As Sen puts it, “Performance for me is a space where the anonymous body becomes an abstraction that can provoke, denounce and resist. Through acts of encountering—between my body, the audience and the sociopolitical conditions we inhabit—I aim to activate new perceptions. Viewers become participants, co-producers of meaning, sometimes even collaborators in imagining social change.”

Artist Shakuntala Kulkarni has long explored the violence on women’s bodies in her practice—not just the physical kind but one that is subtle and serves to restrain women from realising their full potential. Movement has helped her articulate those ideas, sometimes in ways that the audience can merge with the artwork itself. “At the Bukhara Biennale last year, the visitors had to walk up the stairs and peep into a huge tandoor I had built and view the film Trust Game. I want people to feel uncomfortable while they experience the work,” she says.

The performer’s own body also responds to the energy from the viewers. Ibsch feels that receiving so much emotion can also be exhausting. A lot of women come by to share experiences—some tender, others sad—with her; other visitors reject her style of art-making completely. How she responds depends on that moment in the day. In December, when the biennale started, she felt very open to conversations and exchanges. The next month, she tried to find a better balance for her energy levels by trying out different methods. “I enjoy spending time with people. But I need some time to process their reactions. I have found a cap that covers my eyes. It helps me not to be in direct contact with people’s responses immediately,” she says.

Kulkarni explains, “Performance art is not just enactment. We bring so much of ourselves to it. And it takes a lot out of us too. When I use my body to create, I am actually experiencing pain or happiness, and I am also reacting to the other people sharing space with me real-time.”

THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE

Performance art started making its presence felt in India in the 1980s. Non-profit organisation Asia Art Archive (AAA) in India and the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art worked together in 2015 to create a digital archive of performance art from India from the early 1990s through to 2010—a period that gave rise to significant artists and artistic approaches.

A key event that shaped performance art in India was the assault and death of theatre practitioner and activist Safdar Hashmi in 1989, which led to the formation of new alliances among artists. “Performance art (played) a critical role in these articulations and expressions,” says Samudra Kajal Saikia, lead researcher on the project, in an interview published by AAA. “In the decades that followed, it felt as though some major shifts in the art field were finally settling in—a new globalised circulation of visual arts in India had already happened, and performance art had found a footing of its own,” he explains.

Certain artists like Inder Salim and Rummana Hussain (1952-99) became pioneers of performance art in the 1980-90s, using the body as a tool of public confrontation, responding directly to political violence, authoritarianism and social unrest. Especially significant in this regard was Hussain’s Living on the Margins (1995), a powerful work featuring muted screams. Sadly very little documentation of the performance exists. Saikia’s research reveals how certain pathbreaking performance artists in the 1980s like Sushil Kumar—who called his practice performing in the “theatre of the absurd” and created powerful works like Veil (1985)—were opposed to any form of documentation, be it as photo or film. To create an archive of those works, Saikia had to rely on secondary sources like fellow artists’ observations, essays and opinions of viewers from the time.

Yet another artist who stood out at the time was Ratnabali Kant. A trained Kathakali dancer, she created a body-centered performance, Rainbow of Desire, in Athens in 1985. She painted her face and body like a rainbow as a metaphor for hope against tribulations. “Her performances that followed in India drew on ancient, medieval and contemporary sources such as Altamira caves, Byzantine art, Greek sculpture and current politics,” says Rakhee Balaram, associate professor, global art and art history at State University of New York. Using these cross-cultural references, the artist crafted her own expression, combining performance and installation to challenge hierarchical power structures.

Painters and sculptors who were drawn to experimentation also explored performance in the 1990s. Balaram gives the example of M.F. Husain, who painted figures of goddesses at the Tata Centre, Kolkata, in 1992, and then whitewashed the canvases as part of Six Days of Live Painting. This came on the heels of his controversial all-white Shwetambari installation in Mumbai (1991-92), which saw him turn Jehangir Art Gallery into an installation site, covering the two halls in white unstitched khadi cloth and torn newspapers, eliciting mixed responses from critics and visitors.

Vivan Sundaram, Rummana Hussain and Nalini Malani were deeply affected by the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. The political escalation, the event and its aftermath prompted artists to pursue new mediums, such as performance and installation, in response. The 2000s saw an evolution in performance as seen in the artistic practices of Manmeet (Singh) Devgun and Shantanu Lodh. They started performing as a couple in the early years, but later Lodh continued with subversive acts by assuming a different artistic personality called Art Maharaj and Devgun turned to feminist performance.

Soon after, performance art took another turn. It allowed artists across the globe to respond to rituals to comment on and critique what it means to be human. Balaram refers to Sonia Khurana’s Bird (1999) as a prime example of this, in which the artist struggles to fly. The performance stood out for showing a moving and poetic dimension to this act, which is doomed to failure. She also cites the example of American performance artist Chris Burden, who used quasi-religious rituals that tested both the limits of his body and those of the spectator, who often felt compelled to intervene. Repetition became key to artists such as Vito Acconci or Marina Abramović, who have consistently used time, rhythm and occasionally violence as features of their work. Societal rituals have been more recently critiqued by Prabhakar Kamble who uses Ambedkar philosophy and the history of the Dalit movement to confront “caste codes” in his performances.

Today, a certain interdisciplinarity has come to define performance art. Artists like Debashish Paul, Arpita Akhanda, Nikhil Chopra and Sen move between sculpture, performance, image-making, textile and text. Many more are resisting the binaries of painter, sculptor or performers—rather, they call themselves conceptual artists, in which performance art plays a key role. “Capitalism demands fixity, signature styles, and commodifiable objects. By refusing to be contained by a single medium, I intentionally unsettle this logic. My movement across formats is both a conceptual strategy and a form of play—a way of undoing the very notion of an ‘artist’s medium’,” says Sen.

Questions of identity, intimacy and belonging are being addressed through subtle and introspective gestures. “These works reflect a shift in how power is experienced today—less overt, more internalised, and negotiated through personal histories and social structures,” says Smriti Rajgarhia, director, Serendipity Arts Foundation, which supports performance art through grants and residencies.

Paul draws from lived queer experiences, using the body as a site of resilience and emancipation rather than direct confrontation. By wearing sculptural costumes—fantastical hybrids of human, bird and animal—the Varanasi-based artist explores speculative spaces of freedom and acceptance. Though he studied sculpture, Paul started painting alongside and gradually eased into performance. “The latter started as a form of documentation of my elaborate practice featuring sets, costumes and sculpture. Performing to the camera also became a means of capturing my transformation into an adbhut (strange) creature. When I wear the costumes, I become someone else. Later I started performing publicly. There was an instant exchange of emotion with the viewers as we together made space for empathy,” says Paul, who hails from Phulia in West Bengal’s Nadia district.

As with every other aspect of art-making today, technology plays an important role, especially for documentation. By staging a piece for video or still camera before or after the actual performance, this ephemeral form has taken some sort of tangible shape. This becomes significant for scholars, who want to study a piece long after the artist is gone, or for institutions that wish to show a version of the performance. An example is Abramovic’s Waterfall, a sheet of sound and light featuring 108 Buddhist monks chanting the Heart Sutra, being shown at the Kochi Muziris Biennale.

“It is worth emphasising that the ‘live’ aspect of a performance or art-making (which is so dependent on the artist’s body and presence) is impossible to fully capture in photos or videos,” says Balaram. “For French artist Yves Klein, any physical object or remnant was merely the ‘ashes’ of his art.” Nonetheless, some video documentation such as Chris Burden’s approximately 8-second video Shoot (1971) manages to capture some of the brutality and shock of the performance. Closer home, photographs manage to powerfully convey aspects of performances by Inder Salim, Sahej Rahal and Shakuntala Kulkarni. Some like Abramovic are now toying with new technology in the way viewers experience her work. “She explored mixed reality to allow herself to be viewed and experienced digitally in The Life (2019),” says Balaram. “The role of AI in performance art will be a new frontier.”

AN ECOSYSTEM OF CARE

Gradually a support structure is emerging for this genre. While in the 1980s, performance art was seen as a fringe form, today it is being recognised as an independent genre by itself, requiring nurturing and care. Internationally, this came about around 2008-09. There are festivals/programmes in the US such as Pace Live and Performa dedicated to the genre, while institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and Tate London have dedicated media and performance art departments. In India, performance art is part of the programming at the Serendipity Arts Festival and India Art Fair.

This is not your usual practice—it is demanding, often requiring sustained research, experimentation and trust. In such a scenario, it’s foundations such as Serendipity and artist-led spaces like HH Art Spaces and Khoj International Artists’ Association that can support this process, from conception to presentation, documentation, and dialogue. The three-month residency in Delhi by Serendipity Arts Foundation provides studio space, grants and stipends to younger artists like Dileep Chilanka, Dharmendra Prasad, Khursheed Ahmad, Sanghamitra and Pannaga Jois to experiment with performative elements in their practice.

This year’s edition of the India Art Fair shows how the genre has evolved to become more expansive, collaborative and socially embedded. This is evident in Breakfast in a Blizzard, curated by HH Art Spaces. Set within an open-air kitchen constructed to host but not serve food, the work unfolds through a series of “other” offerings—conceptual acts of cooking, feeding, and nourishing that move between metaphor and ritual. “Artists take turns to perform, sometimes overlapping, sometimes coming together in a participatory potluck, foregrounding ideas of care, exchange, and collective presence at a time when connection feels especially fragile,” says fair director Jaya Asokan. .

WHY PERFORMANCE?

How does an artist decide that mere image-making is not enough to articulate certain ideas? Kulkarni reflects on her practice to answer some of these questions. The idea of movement has always appealed to her. Perhaps, this has to do with her initial exposure to theatre and Bharatanatyam as a child. To soak in group energy and use gestures and body language to create something comes naturally to her. “Sometimes drawing is not enough. You need your body to address violence experienced by women. Is it Just a Game? is a series of four video-based performances inspired by games we played as kids. But I wanted to show the power games we play as adults, the fears and the despair we feel as women,” she says. Performance seemed like an apt medium.

Conceptual artist Amol Patil, who is based out of Mumbai and Amsterdam, was always curious about performance as an art form. An exploration of his family archives led to a turn in his practice. “My father was a script writer and performer. Generally, his script had lines, but I would also elaborate on the performer’s expression and gestures,” he says. This archive of text and documents also alluded to discrimination faced by the marginalised castes. It spoke of the city, its challenges and limitations, in a poetic way. That led Patil to explore the relationship between urban landscapes and its marginalised residents in his pieces. Combining installation and performance, the artist often responds to the architectural and cultural memory of Mumbai’s chawls.

The recently concluded Bengaluru Habba showed excerpts from his video performance, Rest, in which Patil looked at street corners, which became a stage for young activists by day and a space for students to study under the lamps by night. He created a miniature version of himself, which sat atop the electrical fitting of a lamp post to signify the “overpowering scale of the city”.

Patil invokes specific memories of his father’s acquaintances as well in his works. “His father’s friend moved on skates, a broom in hand and a radio at his waist, sweeping the street, every day. He cleaned the city, but knew he wasn’t welcome into the bus or in the hotel for a drink of water. Shutting the world out with music was his individual protest,” states an essay on the website of Documenta 15, a major international contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel. Patil recreated that memory in Sweep Walkers (2022), in which performers moved across the exhibition space on skates with cleaning brushes.

A different kind of engagement can be seen in the performance works of Gurugram-based artist Natasha Preenja. She created the alter ego of Princess Pea in 2008-09 in response to the constant objectification faced by women in public spaces. and societal pressures experienced by women. Her signature oversized sculptural head functions both as a tool and a refuge to express, shield and resist. In her practice, the body is both a site and a medium, a sculptural form where everyday life is understood as performance, and each act becomes an expression of solidarity and the ongoing pursuit of gender equality. This sense of performance extends into the everyday lives of the diverse communities she collaborates with. Though Preenja emerged from the anonymity of Princess Pea last year and revealed her identity with a solo at Tarq, she has not abandoned her alter ego. In 2008, she founded the Pea Family studio to work collaboratively with toy makers from Etikopakka in Andhra Pradesh. “At times, I perform beneath the head; at other moments, it is carried and inhabited by the many brave women who have become part of this project,” she says.

Even though performance art centres around the figure of the artist, the act of creation does not always have to be an isolated one. Collaborations have emerged as a cornerstone. For instance, for Drawing a Line through Landscape at Documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017, Chopra embarked on a 30-day road journey that started in Athens and ended in Kassel. “It was me taking a tent in a trailer... across the landscape of Eastern Europe into Western Europe through Central Europe. At every stop, I would erect my tent, and make a drawing on the walls of my tent of what I saw outside of it. At every two locations, my inner wall or the inner lining of the tent would change to make way for a set of new drawings,” he told Platform magazine in an interview. But he wasn’t alone—the costumes for the various personae were designed by artist and fashion researcher Loise Braganza, while artist and production designer Aradhana Seth crafted the tent design.

As life progresses, an artist’s body acquires newer experiences—the relationship with the self also changes. For Sen, this engagement has shifted from metaphorical to material, from representation to risk. For her, each performance begins with a conceptual tension—an unresolved thought that condenses into a single embodied gesture. “The body becomes a porous site where language breaks down, identities slip, and political urgencies surface. I work through the persona of the trickster—shameless, subversive, negotiating boundaries without destroying the world,” she says.

For Patil, the body feels like an object. When he thinks about performing in different places, he envisions the body in relation to everyday routine, object and surroundings. “I see it as a character in a story, and how I can communicate with the people. The body becomes a vessel, a mould to make a political gesture; for me, the body slowly becomes the archive itself. I also try to think of the performance as a communal thing, where I invite people to perform together and create a dialogue with a simple gesture,” he says.

To me, it is the subversion and play underlying some of the performance art pieces that really stand out. Take Sen’s 2019 intervention Lunch is Cancelled at a banquet hosted by the Shalini Passi Art Foundation. She marched into the space with a band and servers, all wearing veterinary cones. It was a radical take on the guest-host role, the limits of tolerance and the cultural subscripts to social interactions. “Performance becomes a tool to redraw the shifting boundaries of otherness,” she says.

Today, we live in a moment of flux, storing memories of uncertain times in our bodies. It remains to be seen how artists will continue to use their self as a site of inquiry into newer hybrid worlds, where technology and consciousness will create a different way of living.

Shalini Umachanran contributed to the story.