At APRE Art House, eleven artists approach gender through memory, desire, performance and the unruly business of becoming oneself.
A few months after India’s Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill was passed in March, APRE Art House has opened Beyond The Binary, an exhibition that arrives at an uneasy moment for questions of gender and self-determination. On view in Colaba through September 5, the show brings together eleven artists across painting, photography, performance and installation.
The timing gives the exhibition a political charge, though its interests extend beyond legislation. Curated by Georgina Maddox, the show moves between generations and artistic languages, resisting the temptation to make non-binary experience legible through a single story.
“What interested us was not to create a single narrative around gender, but to allow very different practices and lived experiences to coexist,” says Prerna S.M. Jain, founder and director of APRE. For her, the exhibition asks audiences to consider the body as both intimate territory and a place onto which society projects its expectations.
That range becomes visible in the artists themselves. Sunil Gupta’s work looks back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when questions of visibility, kinship, diaspora and the imagined freedoms of the West carried particular weight. At the other end of the generational spectrum, Arun Rao approaches homoeroticism through pleasure, pain, acceptance and prohibition. Tejal Shah brings drag, transgender identity and Hijra subjectivities into conversation with South Asian histories, while Maria Lopez turns towards the eroticism of the self.
Elsewhere, Inder Salim considers the performative dimensions of gender; Naman Kumar offers intimate portraits of transgender lives; and Mira Felicia Malhotra introduces a pop-inflected sensibility. Prerit Jain’s interactive installation, Return to Childhood with Juice-Maxxing, imagines a world before gender arrives as a set of instructions. Bobo Calcutta extends the conversation into fashion, bringing clothing into the gallery as both image and object.
The curators are interested in what happens when those differences are allowed to sit alongside one another. “Our hope was to showcase a variety of creative expression and gender politics,” says curator Georgina Maddox. “Each generation has their own narrative to cover.” The works, then, emerge from distinct histories and lived experiences rather than a single definition of gender, moving between visibility, desire, performance, pleasure and prohibition.
That refusal of classification may be the exhibition’s most compelling gesture. “What happens when we allow people the freedom to define themselves on their own terms?” Prerna asks. Beyond The Binary leaves the question open, giving its artists room to answer in paint, photographs, bodies, clothes, memories and play.
What: Beyond The Binary
When: On view until September 5, 2026
Where: APRE Art House
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