This latest Chennai exhibition explores the body's many forms

At a time when AI can imitate almost everything except what it truly feels like to be human, the body still remains our most honest marker of who we are. It carries memory, identity, history, and emotion in ways no machine can copy. Udal: Reading the Body from the Avtar Collection, the ongoing exhibition, invites viewers to “read the body” through more than 50 artworks from the Avtar Collection, each exploring the body in its many forms, moods, and meanings.

The exhibition is aimed at reading the body

Curated by Shruti Parthasarathy, the exhibition began, quite simply, with the desire to look deeper. As collector Jaiveer Johal explains, “What we’re doing here is we’re trying to read the body.” The idea grew organically out of the foundation’s previous show on portraiture. “After exploring the faces in my previous exhibit, we wanted to get into the exploration of the body. When we sifted through the collection, we found that there was a lot of the body in the collection, so it kind of lent itself to a show,” he says.

That lot unfolds across time, style, and intention— from premodern imagination and Rajput miniatures to the modernist tensions of Somnath Hore, FN Souza, and K G Subramanyan; from political fire and protest to tenderness, humour, and abstraction.

Jaiveer walks us through the exhibition like a series of living rooms, each containing a different version of what a body can mean.

“We look at something as the skeletal form of the body through works of Somnath Hore and Surekha.” A lightbox by Manisha Gera Baswani reveals its interiority— “almost the sinews or the bones.”

Then the body becomes political. “ Varunika Saraf’s Voices in the Night, a monumental work talking about the farmers’ protests.” Nearby, echoes of global resistance appear in Krishna Reddy’s rare sculpture, Demonstrators, made after the Paris riots of the 1960s, and Rah Naqvi’s sharp re-reading of contemporary identity.

From there, things turn playful.“We move from there into looking at a different aspect of the body, which is the zoomorphic form of the body—Jamini Roy is two cats playing with a lobster.” And then disembodied: “Lakshmi Madhavan’s Kasavu work is a non-figurative representation of the body.”

One of the most compelling juxtapositions in the show is how we look at the body. “You have Souza with a very traditional heterosexual gaze at a female body versus Arpita Singh, which is a female gaze at the female body.” Couples, fantasy, devotion, ageing, aggression—the body shifts shape with each gaze.

Across these expressions lies the throughline of the exhibition, that the body is both personal and universal, both witness and carrier. Jaiveer hopes visitors leave with curiosity more than conclusion. “If somebody goes away and looks up a certain artist or a certain oeuvre or a certain painting, then that is what we consider a win.”

Open to all. On till December 22. 10 am to 6 pm. At Gallery Espace24, Alliance Francaise de Madras, Nungambakkam.