Moving the Bones, curated by Annalisa Mansukhani, opens in New Delhi and explores familial memory across photography, sound, text and installation.
About the Exhibition
Moving the Bones presents work by Akshay Bhoan, Alina Tiphagne, Divya Cowasji, Krithika Sriram, Remi Graves, Sandeep TK, Shailee Mehta, Srinivas Kuruganti, Tripty Tamang Pakhrin and Uzma Mohsin. The show centres on the familial image—how photographs, objects and stories carry weight and distortion over time. Artists use staged photography, embroidery, audio and mixed media to test what is remembered, what is lost, and what is withheld.
Curatorial Vision
Curator Annalisa Mansukhani developed the exhibition during a curatorial residency at Château La Napoule in March 2025, as part of the Villa Swagatam programme. Mansukhani draws on Rick Barot’s poem “Moving the Bones” to frame memory as both monument and labour: “We hold the bones, though we know memory is mostly forgetting,” she writes. Her selection foregrounds practices that unsettle conventional family narratives and make visible the labour of remembering.
Key Themes
The exhibition unfolds along three intersecting axes: the gendered labour of remembering, motile archives and their afterlives, and the familial as estranged terrain. Works restage, dissolve, embroider and speak family forms, revealing how histories of violence, care and desire reconfigure private images into public traces. The show asks what memory asks us to carry forward and what is transformed in transit.
Artist Practice and Highlights
Participating artists offer a range of media that unsettle the static family photograph. From sound pieces that recall absence to textile and photographic interventions that recombine inherited imagery, highlights include intimate reworkings that emphasise bodily and verbal transmission of memory. The curatorial thread links these diverse practices into a sustained interrogation of inheritance and forgetting.
Exhibition details
Title: Moving the Bones
Curator: Annalisa Mansukhani (Art Scribes Award 2024–25 recipient)
Artists: Akshay Bhoan, Alina Tiphagne, Divya Cowasji, Krithika Sriram, Remi Graves, Sandeep TK, Shailee Mehta, Srinivas Kuruganti, Tripty Tamang Pakhrin, Uzma Mohsin
Venue: Shrine Empire, B-24 (Basement), Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024
Preview: 29 May 2026, 6 pm–9 pm
Exhibition dates: 29 May–24 June 2026, 11 am–6 pm daily
Organiser: Prameya Art Foundation (in partnership with Institut Français / Villa Swagatam)
This article has been created from the press kit shared with Abir Pothi. For press releases and related queries, write to editor@abirpothi.com.
Cover Image: Divya Cowasji | There Are No Love Letters Here | Digital prints with text excerpted from the photobook, 2018–2026 | Image courtesy: The artist and Prameya Art Foundation.
Akanksha is an Associate Editor at Abir Pothi, writing on contemporary art and creating engaging videos that highlight artists and make art accessible to wider audiences.
