Richi Bhatia: Antevasin – the one who sits at the border of two worlds
Gallery Isabelle, Dubai | June 15 – September 10, 2025
A radical, multi-sensory exploration of transnational identity, labour, food systems, and the porous boundaries between human and nonhuman life.
Richi Bhatia, the Indian-born multimedia and performance artist, brings a searing new solo exhibition to Gallery Isabelle in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue. Titled Antevasin – The One Who Sits At The Border Of Two Worlds, the show runs from June 15 to September 10, 2025, and dives into themes of liminality, labour, food, gender, species, and mortality through a profoundly intimate yet globally entangled lens.
Rooted in Bhatia’s lived experience across India and the UAE, the exhibition is anchored by the concept of the Antevasin— a Sanskrit term meaning “one who lives at the border.” This figure becomes both a metaphor and a methodology throughout the exhibition, guiding viewers through Bhatia’s deeply sensorial, often unsettling universe where human and nonhuman life forms meet, merge, and metabolise one another.
Sitting with Discomfort: An Exhibition Without a Protagonist
Unlike traditional solo shows built around a single heroic centrepiece, Antevasin – The One Who Sits At The Border Of Two Worlds unfolds as a constellation of works that resist hierarchy. Each piece is an encounter —tactile, auditory, olfactory —that asks viewers to reconsider how categories such as species, labour, gender, and food are constructed, and how these constructions are weaponised or exploited.
Bhatia’s artistic vocabulary encompasses a diverse range of forms, including sculpture, video, ceramics, performance, and installation. Across these media, she engages with both ethnographic and autoethnographic research, embedding herself in India and Dubai’s meat and fish markets, speaking with workers, handling raw materials, and translating these exchanges into artworks that breathe, decay, and remember.
Fish Scales and Skin as Sites of Transformation
One of the exhibition’s most visceral points of departure is Bhatia’s own body. Living with a visible skin condition for over a decade, she began to reimagine her skin not as a flaw, but as a scale — a place of layered texture, vulnerability, and strength. This personal lens opens into a much larger inquiry into the life of fish in global food systems.
In works like The Animals, The Bodies, and Coefficient of Time (2025), fish scales are repurposed to build shelter-like sculptural structures. These forms mimic temporary worker accommodations found in urban fringes of India and the UAE, and also draw from visual patterns observed in butcher stalls and meat displays. The results are corporeal and uncanny — works that hold the smell of markets, the labour of scaling and gutting, and the quiet dignity of those who perform these repetitive, invisible tasks.
Ceramic Objects and Market Archives: Table – Bed II
One of the most provocative installations in the show is Table – Bed II (2025), a complex tableau of raw materials sourced from markets and transformed into ritual-like objects. Ceramic works shaped like sausages and processed meat sit beside pieces of raw ‘ojhri’ (stomach lining), hand-stitched books, animal hides, and water from melted ice used to preserve fish.
In this layered composition, food becomes unstable, both sustainer and destroyer. Its beauty is entangled with horror. Bhatia invites the audience not just to observe, but to smell, read, and emotionally reckon with a world where life and death are always co-present.
In a handmade artist’s book, Include Some, Exclude Others (2025), Bhatia weaves strands of her hair alongside words spoken by market workers. Words like “ojhri” appear in Urdu, Hindi, Sindhi, and Arabic — mapping the diasporic journeys of labourers and the global trade routes of animal bodies. This linguistic layering becomes a meditation on migration, fragmentation, and the politics of bodily erasure.
Multispecies Performance and Butter Rituals
In the three-channel video piece The Girl, the Donkey, and an Elixir for Life… (2022–2025), Bhatia collaborates with an abandoned donkey in Leh, India, to reflect on gender roles, animal labour, and domestic tradition. The video chronicles the act of butter-churning — historically carried out by women using sheepskins — and its transformation into a male-dominated trade along the Silk Road.
Through this collaboration, Bhatia creates a narrative that collapses binaries: the donkey is both labourer and recipient, the butter is both food and offering, the artist is both director and participant. The video’s soundscape weaves women’s chants with the hum of wind across Leh’s barren landscapes, evoking both time and timelessness.
In the final scene, churned butter is symbolically fed to the donkey, honouring the animal’s role and unsettling the human-centric lens through which culture is often narrated. This multispecies performance art becomes an act of reciprocal recognition, collapsing distinctions between labourer and beneficiary, production and sacrifice.
Vessels and Assemblages: Iterative Acts of Remembering
Works like Vessels I, II, III (2024–2025) and Assemblages (2025) serve as evidence of Bhatia’s process-oriented practice. These pieces are built from raw and found materials collected over multiple years and across borders — remnants of labour, consumption, and trade. From rusted tools to bones and textiles, they echo her commitment to uncovering not just material connections, but affective and ancestral ones.
Bhatia’s assemblages are quiet and intimate, but also confrontational in their rawness. Their placement in the gallery challenges traditional notions of display and aesthetics, urging audiences to consider how value is constructed in art, in labour, and in life.
Liminality as Method and Message
At its core, Antevasin – The One Who Sits At The Border Of Two Worlds is an invitation to inhabit liminal space, not as an abstract concept but as a lived reality. The Antevasin, the border-dweller, is not caught between worlds but enriched by the tension they hold. Through her work, Bhatia expands this notion to encompass the many borders we cross daily — between consumption and complicity, visibility and invisibility, belonging and alienation.
Her transnational practice, spanning India and the UAE, resists easy categorisation. It is at once profoundly personal and rigorously academic, poetic and political, tender and brutal. And in doing so, it captures the multiplicity of contemporary life, especially for those living and working across geographic, cultural, and biological boundaries.
All photography: Altamash Urooj, Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Isabelle, Dubai
Visit the Exhibition
Richi Bhatia’s Antevasin – The One Who Sits At The Border Of Two Worlds is on view at Gallery Isabelle in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, from June 15 to September 10, 2025. Located in the heart of the UAE’s contemporary art scene, Gallery Isabelle provides a reflective and immersive environment for viewers to engage with this challenging and timely body of work.
This is not an exhibition to be viewed passively. It is to be felt, smelled, pondered, and remembered. It is a reminder that the border is not the end — it is where transformation begins.
