In the gentle graphite world of Infinite Deviations, Yogesh Rai invites viewers into shadow, quiet, and the slow revolution of tenderness. On view at Akara Contemporary in Mumbai, the exhibition builds an intimate topography of bodies slipping between visibility and secrecy, desire and hesitation. In a moment where queer narratives are often pushed towards spectacle or declaration, Rai turns instead to muted graphite and patient repetition, offering a language of softness spoken in whispers yet steady in conviction.
Raised in Jhansi, distant from metropolitan anonymity and its pockets of queer refuge, Rai learned early the choreography demanded by rigid gender norms. Judith Butler’s “regulation” of the body appears here not as academic ornament, but as lived muscle memory: a shoulder held too still, a gesture softened before it became suspicious, touch rehearsed then withheld. His figures, often partial and tessellated within rhythmic grids of limbs, seem to hold their breath in a world that once asked them to. Yet they hold each other too. Hands overlap, fingers loop, torsos lean. If surveillance shaped the body in youth, tenderness now reshapes it through art.
Rai speaks of his formative years with an honesty that never spills into self-pity. His purpose lies in re-seeing rather than reopening wounds. “Returning to those memories is less about re-entering the past and more about re-understanding it,” he says, “how shame, secrecy, and curiosity once intertwined to shape how I saw myself.” That attention to quiet feeling permeates his drawings. Touch arrives as suggestion rather than proof, a brush of knuckles, a shared breath. There is no confession here. There is rest.
Theory circulates beneath the surface, steady as a pulse. Rai reads, absorbs, and leaves language behind when pencil meets paper. “The hand doesn’t move academically,” he notes. “It remembers gestures, rhythms, hesitations.” The result is neither an illustration of Butler nor a homage to Foucault. Instead, it feels like unlearning enacted through the body: lines that falter on purpose, symmetries that lean on one another, a grid that tries to contain softness yet ends up supporting it. Structure remains, without hard authority; order becomes a site for gentle resistance.
Shaunak Mahbubani, the writer behind this show, places Rai within a queer surrealist lineage that spans Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, as well as thought from Butler, Foucault, and Édouard Glissant.
Shaunak sees the exhibition as an invitation to recognise shared stakes in dismantling rigid roles. “Men are also affected by patriarchy and its rigid rules on how to be masculine,” they remark. “In seeing that we all aspire to exist and love more freely, we can fortify the common social ground.” Rai’s drawings hold that aspiration with rare gentleness. Masculinity, queerness, touch, and vulnerability all move here without hierarchy, as if learning new postures in real time.
What emerges across the gallery walls is a practice rooted in patience. Each graphite stroke feels like a small rehearsal for a freer way of being, each repetition a quiet refusal to return to rigidity.
On view from 11 November to 27 December 2025 at Akara Contemporary
2nd Floor, 3C Amarchand Mansion, 16 Madam Cama Road, Colaba,
Mumbai 400001
Exhibition Timings: 11 am - 6:30 pm | Tuesday - Saturday
(Story by Esha Aphale)
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