On a warm December evening in Goa, the opening of AUTOPOIESIS: A Song for Resuscitation unfolded less as a private view than as a gathering attuned to breath, rhythm and memory. A live sonic performance by Imaad Majeed drew visitors into a shared cadence of clapping and listening, setting the tone for an exhibition invested in intimacy rather than spectacle. Curated by Shaunak Mahbubani, the show brings together six artists from peninsular South Asia whose practices insist on the right to speak from lived, ancestral and communal experience, without translation into ethnographic shorthand.
Staged at Arthshila Goa from December 2025 to March 2026, the exhibition forms part of Mahbubani’s ongoing AUTOPOIESIS research series, which traces what they describe as the “auto-narrative turn” in contemporary art across the subcontinent and its diasporas. The title borrows from biology, where autopoiesis refers to a system capable of reproducing and sustaining itself. Here, the term becomes a proposition for cultural survival: how stories, rituals and languages persist despite centuries of colonial violence, caste oppression and reformist erasure.
Mahbubani frames the exhibition as a “song for resuscitation,” an image that recurs throughout the show. “Through the erasure of histories and the devalourisation of language, food, ways of walking, talking, laughing, amongst so many other facets of culture, our archives have been facing violence over the centuries,” they explain. In response, the artists reclaim these wounded archives, each presenting them in a way that is rooted in their particular ancestral experience as well as their contemporary reality.
The exhibition opens with works by Jahangir Jani, whose long career has shaped the conditions for many of the practices gathered here. Emerging in Mumbai in the 1990s with unflinching depictions of queer desire, Jani’s recent paintings move towards spiritual abstraction, assembled from burned detritus, packaging and fragments of text. These gestures hover between memory and imagination. “The autobiographical references are rites of passage that adhere in memory or even imagination,” Jani says. “It’s a kind of past/present pendulum. Abstraction is nothing as in no thing where the challenge is to articulate it.”
Nearby, Jovita Alvares’ two-channel video and illuminated photo sculptures confront a different kind of absence. Working with a sparse family archive, Alvares traces her grandmother’s migration from Goa to Karachi, situating Pakistani Christian histories that have slipped between dominant national narratives. Rather than reconstruct what has been lost, her work insists on staying with the gaps. “I realised that highlighting the loss is more important,” Alvares reflects, “because even though for me it comes from a personal space, it is a familiar story for many others… this loss, this hole, this pain, is real, it continues to hover among the present and is a living scar.” Light, for Alvares, becomes both a technical and symbolic tool: a conduit between viewer and the phantoms of a lost history.
Textiles and touch take centre stage in Saviya Lopes’ contribution. Drawing from her grandfather’s journey from Vasai to Freetown, Sierra Leone, Lopes transforms documents and postcards into soft, hand-worked cloth forms. The works gesture towards her grandmother’s daily labour, foregrounding how women’s domestic practices carry memory across oceans. In the context of Goa, with its layered histories of trade and migration, these resonances across the Indian Ocean world feel particularly charged.
Questions of access to language and learning run through Sajan Mani’s paintings and inscriptions. Mani, who grew up in a family of rubber tappers in northern Kerala, abstracts Malayalam script until it bears the physical strain of labour. References to anti-caste revolutionary poetry surface and recede, demanding a bodily engagement from the viewer. His work asserts literacy as a site of struggle, where the right to read and write becomes inseparable from the right to exist with dignity.
Sound, however, anchors the exhibition’s emotional core. Priyageetha Dia’s immersive CGI video centres oppari, a Tamil Dalit lamentation practice historically performed by women during funerals. Translating such an embodied, caste-marked ritual into a digital environment risks flattening its force, yet Dia approaches the medium with restraint. “I avoid reenactment,” she explains, “instead building a virtual world shaped by its political and affective conditions.” The result preserves the weight of communal grief while opening new modes of encounter and listening.
Majeed’s sonic installation and live performance extend this exploration of lament and breath. Documenting kummi adi, a Tamil musical form once practised by Muslim women and later suppressed by reformist movements, Majeed resists the language of recovery. “I do not consider my approach a reconstruction,” they say, “rather a resuscitation, an allowing of breath to flow through again.” Inviting audiences to clap along, the work collapses the distance between archive and present, grief and joy. Majeed describes this convergence through the Sufi concept of wajd, where rapture and sorrow coexist.
Underlying the exhibition is a clear institutional critique. Mahbubani is frank about the barriers auto-narrative artists continue to face. “The art world often functions as a closed group within which opportunities circle around,” they note, calling on funders, curators and collectors to pay closer attention to artists speaking from within their communities rather than about them . This insistence feels pointed in a moment when South Asian art enjoys heightened global visibility, yet risks reproducing extractive modes of display.
At Arthshila Goa, those tensions remain unresolved, deliberately so. The exhibition does not offer a singular story of South Asia, nor does it smooth over contradictions between caste, religion, gender and geography. Instead, it asks what happens when artists are given space to hold complexity on their own terms. As Mahbubani puts it, the task lies in asking “whose stories are we listening to and whose voices are making their way to museum shows and private collections?”
In AUTOPOIESIS: A Song for Resuscitation, the answer emerges slowly, through rhythm, touch and quiet acts of attention. The show asks viewers to listen closely, to sit with discomfort, and to recognise that some archives survive precisely because they refuse to be neatly restored.
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