Body Politics, Performance and Social Critique
SPEAKER(S)
Mansi Bhatt
RESPONDENT
Amrita Gupta
Mansi Bhatt is a lens-based artist whose practice intersects theatricality, body politics, and social critique. Through performative photography, often extending to sculptural and cinematic transformation, as well as public art, she constructs surreal, incongruous characters via prosthetics, costumes, and exaggerated makeup. Blurring fiction and reality, these figures are drawn from family histories in Sihor, neighbourhood tales and street encounters in Mumbai and elsewhere, and interrogations of the structures of the Indian art world. Incorporating gender as performance, her work probes questions of home, place, migration, identity, belonging, urbanity, capital, and surveyed landscapes.
Her layered approach uses autoethnography as a feminist methodology, weaving time-based, site-responsive photography and performance rooted in lived contexts. By embracing personal vulnerability and her body’s material presence, Bhatt positions the self as both subject and site, creating a fluid space of generative possibility. Her immersive performances test physical endurance as a trope, especially in policed, denied, or violently reclaimed environments.
In this conversation, Mansi presents selected works spanning two decades of artistic experimentation across performative photography, installations, and public art, culminating in her recent 30-minute film “Pottery House”(2024-25). This film intertwines multidisciplinary threads around home and belonging, and explores the poetics of memory, presence and absence, and acts of remembrance. The artist will also discuss the aspects of place, space, and the public in her practice.
Refreshments will be served at 5.30pm.
In collaboration with DesignWorks
Join us on Saturday, April 18, 2026 | 6.00pm
607, Bhumiraj Costarica, Sector 18, Sanpada, Navi Mumbai
Limited Seats | RSVP to team@casp-india.org
607, Bhumiraj Costarica, Sector 18, Sanpada, Navi Mumbai
Limited Seats | RSVP to team@casp-india.org
Based in Mumbai, Mansi Bhatt works within performative photography, public art, video and film. Using prosthetic makeup, body extensions, sets, and costumes, she stages playful yet unsettling tableaux exploring reality, nature, body, and capital. Bhatt received a diploma in Applied Art at Kala Kendra College of Fine Art, Vallabh Vidhyanagar, Gujarat (1993-1995) and then moved to Mumbai and enrolled in the Sir J.J. School of Art as a student of painting (BFA: 1995 – 2000).
Exhibiting since 2006 in India and abroad, Bhatt has participated in various artist residencies including The Watermill Centre, New York (2005), Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2007), and KHOJ, Delhi (2010). She was nominated for the Performance Art Initiative at The Tetley, Leeds (2017) and the Mrinalini Mukherjee Creative Arts Grant (2023). Her solo exhibitions include at Chatterjee & Lal (2006; 2009), the Shanghai Biennale (2012), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016–2017), Goethe Insitut (2019) and The Guild (2025). Her recent film “Pottery House” was showcased at The Guild and CAMP, Mumbai, Museum of Art & Photography, Bangalore, and Shared Ecologies, Delhi. In addition to her art practice, she has actively taught in art, design, and architecture schools in Mumbai.