Deep (A return to the (Un)Discovered Self ) Interiors
As a thematic choice, the subject of and the quest for interiority have been among the most popular themes in artistic practice and exhibition-making in recent years. More than just an artistic and philosophical exploration, the subject is being examined, further deepening the effort to understand the complexities and urgency of shaping its specifics within the context of the self and evolving relationship to the changing present. ‘Deep Interiors’ as a curatorial inquiry, refers to various moments of encounters and their repetitions as a pursuit to witness similar yet distinct versions of the self through individual artistic labour and production within their respective practices. Likewise, this exhibition as a whole, also prompts us to question the evolving complex relationship among the self, the body, and its immediate surroundings, evolved during recent times. In this way, it’s intriguing to see how, through different artistic practices, this exhibition contributes to the discourse on transforming selves through fragmented fetishisation, the semiotics of collectivity, and their corporality as a form of embedded identity.
Through four sections, the exhibition ‘Deep Interiors- A Return to (Un)Discovered Self’ helps engage with larger questions about how the idea of interiority is a co-dependent phenomenon of exterior and interior, past and present, and socio-cultural and historical paradigms. It allows us to explore artistic frameworks that emphasize how the interior is larger than the exterior, serving as a space of permanence in contrast to the ephemerality of the exterior. This space also functions like a repository of multiple times, contrasting with the ever-changing present: the exterior. Working with my curatorial concerns, I have been deeply fascinated by the notion of corporality as an entry point referring to French philosopher Michel Foucault who, in his writings, discusses how the body acts as a site of power, discipline, and control (Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality), and how the self is shaped through corporeal practices and social inscriptions. Similarly, the concept of Body without Organs, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, has influenced my curatorial thinking by understanding artistic practices as sites where the body resists being fixed in identity, roles, or functions, instead opening up to flows, intensities, and constant becoming. Extending these theoretical ideas, this curatorial choice seeks to understand how interiors relate to the self and body through the corporeal exterior apparatus. It explores how, in this process, the self is rejected or even irrevocably suppressed in various ways, during recent times. Furthermore, it aims to problematise how we might navigate the relationship between the self and memory, where memory is controlled through the self’s limitations. In many ways, the notion of the contemporary self in this context is seen as other-determined, other-oriented, and other-specific. Could it mean that the Self exists without the Memories of itself?
As a thematic choice, the subject of and the quest for interiority have been among the most popular themes in artistic practice and exhibition-making in recent years. More than just an artistic and philosophical exploration, the subject is being examined, further deepening the effort to understand the complexities and urgency of shaping its specifics within the context of the self and evolving relationship to the changing present. ‘Deep Interiors’ as a curatorial inquiry, refers to various moments of encounters and their repetitions as a pursuit to witness similar yet distinct versions of the self through individual artistic labour and production within their respective practices. Likewise, this exhibition as a whole, also prompts us to question the evolving complex relationship among the self, the body, and its immediate surroundings, evolved during recent times. In this way, it’s intriguing to see how, through different artistic practices, this exhibition contributes to the discourse on transforming selves through fragmented fetishisation, the semiotics of collectivity, and their corporality as a form of embedded identity.
Through four sections, the exhibition ‘Deep Interiors- A Return to (Un)Discovered Self’ helps engage with larger questions about how the idea of interiority is a co-dependent phenomenon of exterior and interior, past and present, and socio-cultural and historical paradigms. It allows us to explore artistic frameworks that emphasize how the interior is larger than the exterior, serving as a space of permanence in contrast to the ephemerality of the exterior. This space also functions like a repository of multiple times, contrasting with the ever-changing present: the exterior. Working with my curatorial concerns, I have been deeply fascinated by the notion of corporality as an entry point referring to French philosopher Michel Foucault who, in his writings, discusses how the body acts as a site of power, discipline, and control (Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality), and how the self is shaped through corporeal practices and social inscriptions. Similarly, the concept of Body without Organs, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, has influenced my curatorial thinking by understanding artistic practices as sites where the body resists being fixed in identity, roles, or functions, instead opening up to flows, intensities, and constant becoming. Extending these theoretical ideas, this curatorial choice seeks to understand how interiors relate to the self and body through the corporeal exterior apparatus. It explores how, in this process, the self is rejected or even irrevocably suppressed in various ways, during recent times. Furthermore, it aims to problematise how we might navigate the relationship between the self and memory, where memory is controlled through the self’s limitations. In many ways, the notion of the contemporary self in this context is seen as other-determined, other-oriented, and other-specific. Could it mean that the Self exists without the Memories of itself?
As the title suggests, this exhibition mainly explores the transformation of the self as a journey back to inner worlds. It begins with the research questions that have gradually shaped my curatorial inquiries. An important component, ‘Deep Interiors’, aims to understand the artistic processes that influence the portrayal of inner selves. Similarly, through this exhibition, I am interested in understanding how this quest has developed across different stages of artistic practice. Extending this idea, the exhibition asks whether the concept of interiority, as an incomprehensible phenomenon, can be understood through its rhetoric. If the interior becomes known, visible, and familiar, will it still be personal, subjective, and individual? In the evolving times we are living in, does the concept of interiority and its complex relationship with society and the human psyche, require new frameworks that can offer a better understanding of how both public and private spheres shape the individual? With these questions in mind, my curatorial goal is to create an exhibition that reflects the evolution of artistic practice that both questions and embraces the idea of interiority as a search for the self in various forms of visual art.
This curatorial idea is shaped by socio-political and historical movements that have significantly influenced art history through its various phases. The curatorial focus of this show draws inspiration from late 19th and early 20th-century psychoanalytic movements, incorporating theories from Freud, Jung, and later Lacan. These theories radically transformed our understanding of the unconscious, dreams, and inner psychic lives, impacting art movements such as surrealism and performance art. Additionally, movements around identity politics, like Black Lives Matter and decolonial struggles, have provided visual languages that shape art history and practice, highlighting marginalized voices and bodily presence as acts of political and cultural assertion. Similarly, contemporary globalisation and digital life have redefined artistic engagement with interiority, emphasizing digital identities and the fluidity between exterior and interior as aspects of embedded selves. Throughout art history, from ‘Romanticism’ to ‘Expressionism', ‘Minimalism and Post-Minimalism’, ‘Relational Practices’, and ‘Contemporary Practices’, there has been a persistent exploration of the self, rooted in personal experience and shifting through the aesthetic politics and visualities influenced by social movements of different times. In short, this curatorial inquiry into interiority, self, and body in art arises from the intersection of psychoanalysis, philosophy, socio-political struggles, and avant-garde art movements. While exploring these nuances, Deep-Interiors helps me frame my own questions and position artistic practices that can contribute to the broader themes through which the concept is understood today.
As the exhibition's curatorial premise is pretty broad, it provides opportunities to engage with a diverse range of artists and their practices across generations. This creates layered meanings that contribute to the discourse on interiorities of the day, while also analyzing shifts in its overall significance. ‘Deep Interiors: A Return to the (Un)Discovered Self’ features 34 artists working across various media, timelines, and geographies. To bring diversity in contexts of the subjects, the exhibition and its curatorial premise are divided into four large galleries at the Hyderabad State Art Gallery, each with its own sub-theme that grounds the conceptual heterogeneity within the larger curatorial idea. The first section, ‘Interfacing Interiority’, refers to a beginning through architectural interiors that regulate movement and memory within bodily interiorities. Works in this section challenge the autonomy of human subjectivity, highlighting artistic concerns where architectural structures shape the human psyche as a living entity. Extending this focus on architectural elements, the section also explores artistic interpretations of interfaces as a way to return to the self, reflected in contemporary representations. The dual emphasis in this section on architectural space and interfaces shows intersections where the body, skin, screen, and surveillance serve as guiding elements, prompting a sense of self-return amid transformations in a post-algorithmic world. Overall, this section, ‘Interfacing Interiority’, addresses various levels of psychic transformation through structural delusions and the multiplicity of representations that penetrate the unconscious and influence living conditions.
Similarly, the second section, ‘Contentment and Transformation’, investigates interiority by examining domesticity as a departure from controlled, societal, and shared frameworks. It views the interior as a continual state of transformation and self-reflection. This section emphasizes artistic impulses that transcend bodily release, shaping aesthetic, visual, and performative representations of interiority and interiorization through artistic practices. These transcendental releases offer frameworks that break down the boundaries between interior and exterior, making the body and self sites of ongoing transformation and relational reciprocity. The third section, ‘The Self and The Other’, delves into curatorial interests in questioning the completeness of the self, shaped by negotiations among the I, the Non-I, and the Other. Throughout art history, artists’ responses to their self, surroundings, and influences of ‘The Other’ in consciousness, have been fascinating. This section features artworks reflecting how artists from different generations have represented the self through abstraction and figuration. Likewise, extending the concept, the search for the self also investigates how the idea of vernacular shapes engagement of figuration and abstraction as artistic exploration. Transitioning from ‘Contentment and Transformation’ to ‘The Self and The Other', it illustrates a move from accumulating the self to proclaiming it.
Moving into the final section, ‘Bodily Embodiments', the focus shifts to understanding how the body becomes an archive and testimonial. Works here explore personal histories, narratives of conflict, and external forces of change that rupture the interior self. As the concluding section, it emphasizes artistic concerns related to affect and memory, where the body absorbs residues of continued events that shape the self's social, cultural, political, and personal identities. Overall, this section offers a spatial understanding that helps us grasp the nuances of the extended body and self, highlighting the poetics of material histories in personal narratives.
The four interconnected sections of this exhibition: ‘Interfacing Interiority’, ‘Contentment and Transformation’, ‘The Self and The Other’, and ‘Bodily Embodiments’, form the core of its curatorial framework, offering experiences that oscillate between individual and collective meanings. This enables us to view similar themes and artistic concerns from different times as coexisting epistemologies. It allows us to build a shared knowledge that enhances the understanding of one’s practice through others. The exhibition invites us to see how different generations engage with similar concerns, creating a space for transitions, overlaps, and contradictions that shape the meaning of the self, body, and interiority across time. Overall, Deep Interior provides a curatorial framework that explores the coexistence of the continuous past and the potential future through the lens of a present that exists as a non-existent phenomenon. Starting from the evolving nature of architectural homogenization and the placelessness of individual autonomy, the sections move through a return to the self through release, action, and transformation, to confronting the other as a form shaping the self. ‘Deep Interiors’ questions where the complete self resides, while offering opportunities for ongoing exploration of self-awareness amid the complexities of our times. As noted earlier, the premise of ‘Deep Interiors’ is not only to examine how artists have historically explored interiority as an intangible, unseen, and often unrealized phenomenon but also to question how witnessing interiority as an external force beyond individual understanding is possible. ‘Deep Interiors- A Return to (Un)Discovered Self’ aims to highlight art’s power to evolve continuously, redefining and reclaiming artistic autonomy while dismantling various corporeal frameworks for imprisoning the self. By challenging traditional ideas of what the self is or is becoming, the exhibition creates space for expansive expressions of subjectivity, where the subconscious can emerge beyond the limits of language.
As a thematic choice, the subject of and the quest for interiority have been among the most popular themes in artistic practice and exhibition-making in recent years. More than just an artistic and philosophical exploration, the subject is being examined, further deepening the effort to understand the complexities and urgency of shaping its specifics within the context of the self and evolving relationship to the changing present. ‘Deep Interiors’ as a curatorial inquiry, refers to various moments of encounters and their repetitions as a pursuit to witness similar yet distinct versions of the self through individual artistic labour and production within their respective practices. Likewise, this exhibition as a whole, also prompts us to question the evolving complex relationship among the self, the body, and its immediate surroundings, evolved during recent times. In this way, it’s intriguing to see how, through different artistic practices, this exhibition contributes to the discourse on transforming selves through fragmented fetishisation, the semiotics of collectivity, and their corporality as a form of embedded identity.
Through four sections, the exhibition ‘Deep Interiors- A Return to (Un)Discovered Self’ helps engage with larger questions about how the idea of interiority is a co-dependent phenomenon of exterior and interior, past and present, and socio-cultural and historical paradigms. It allows us to explore artistic frameworks that emphasize how the interior is larger than the exterior, serving as a space of permanence in contrast to the ephemerality of the exterior. This space also functions like a repository of multiple times, contrasting with the ever-changing present: the exterior. Working with my curatorial concerns, I have been deeply fascinated by the notion of corporality as an entry point referring to French philosopher Michel Foucault who, in his writings, discusses how the body acts as a site of power, discipline, and control (Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality), and how the self is shaped through corporeal practices and social inscriptions. Similarly, the concept of Body without Organs, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, has influenced my curatorial thinking by understanding artistic practices as sites where the body resists being fixed in identity, roles, or functions, instead opening up to flows, intensities, and constant becoming. Extending these theoretical ideas, this curatorial choice seeks to understand how interiors relate to the self and body through the corporeal exterior apparatus. It explores how, in this process, the self is rejected or even irrevocably suppressed in various ways, during recent times. Furthermore, it aims to problematise how we might navigate the relationship between the self and memory, where memory is controlled through the self’s limitations. In many ways, the notion of the contemporary self in this context is seen as other-determined, other-oriented, and other-specific. Could it mean that the Self exists without the Memories of itself?
As the title suggests, this exhibition mainly explores the transformation of the self as a journey back to inner worlds. It begins with the research questions that have gradually shaped my curatorial inquiries. An important component, ‘Deep Interiors’, aims to understand the artistic processes that influence the portrayal of inner selves. Similarly, through this exhibition, I am interested in understanding how this quest has developed across different stages of artistic practice. Extending this idea, the exhibition asks whether the concept of interiority, as an incomprehensible phenomenon, can be understood through its rhetoric. If the interior becomes known, visible, and familiar, will it still be personal, subjective, and individual? In the evolving times we are living in, does the concept of interiority and its complex relationship with society and the human psyche, require new frameworks that can offer a better understanding of how both public and private spheres shape the individual? With these questions in mind, my curatorial goal is to create an exhibition that reflects the evolution of artistic practice that both questions and embraces the idea of interiority as a search for the self in various forms of visual art.
This curatorial idea is shaped by socio-political and historical movements that have significantly influenced art history through its various phases. The curatorial focus of this show draws inspiration from late 19th and early 20th-century psychoanalytic movements, incorporating theories from Freud, Jung, and later Lacan. These theories radically transformed our understanding of the unconscious, dreams, and inner psychic lives, impacting art movements such as surrealism and performance art. Additionally, movements around identity politics, like Black Lives Matter and decolonial struggles, have provided visual languages that shape art history and practice, highlighting marginalized voices and bodily presence as acts of political and cultural assertion. Similarly, contemporary globalisation and digital life have redefined artistic engagement with interiority, emphasizing digital identities and the fluidity between exterior and interior as aspects of embedded selves. Throughout art history, from ‘Romanticism’ to ‘Expressionism', ‘Minimalism and Post-Minimalism’, ‘Relational Practices’, and ‘Contemporary Practices’, there has been a persistent exploration of the self, rooted in personal experience and shifting through the aesthetic politics and visualities influenced by social movements of different times. In short, this curatorial inquiry into interiority, self, and body in art arises from the intersection of psychoanalysis, philosophy, socio-political struggles, and avant-garde art movements. While exploring these nuances, Deep-Interiors helps me frame my own questions and position artistic practices that can contribute to the broader themes through which the concept is understood today.
As the exhibition's curatorial premise is pretty broad, it provides opportunities to engage with a diverse range of artists and their practices across generations. This creates layered meanings that contribute to the discourse on interiorities of the day, while also analyzing shifts in its overall significance. ‘Deep Interiors: A Return to the (Un)Discovered Self’ features 34 artists working across various media, timelines, and geographies. To bring diversity in contexts of the subjects, the exhibition and its curatorial premise are divided into four large galleries at the Hyderabad State Art Gallery, each with its own sub-theme that grounds the conceptual heterogeneity within the larger curatorial idea. The first section, ‘Interfacing Interiority’, refers to a beginning through architectural interiors that regulate movement and memory within bodily interiorities. Works in this section challenge the autonomy of human subjectivity, highlighting artistic concerns where architectural structures shape the human psyche as a living entity. Extending this focus on architectural elements, the section also explores artistic interpretations of interfaces as a way to return to the self, reflected in contemporary representations. The dual emphasis in this section on architectural space and interfaces shows intersections where the body, skin, screen, and surveillance serve as guiding elements, prompting a sense of self-return amid transformations in a post-algorithmic world. Overall, this section, ‘Interfacing Interiority’, addresses various levels of psychic transformation through structural delusions and the multiplicity of representations that penetrate the unconscious and influence living conditions.
Similarly, the second section, ‘Contentment and Transformation’, investigates interiority by examining domesticity as a departure from controlled, societal, and shared frameworks. It views the interior as a continual state of transformation and self-reflection. This section emphasizes artistic impulses that transcend bodily release, shaping aesthetic, visual, and performative representations of interiority and interiorization through artistic practices. These transcendental releases offer frameworks that break down the boundaries between interior and exterior, making the body and self sites of ongoing transformation and relational reciprocity. The third section, ‘The Self and The Other’, delves into curatorial interests in questioning the completeness of the self, shaped by negotiations among the I, the Non-I, and the Other. Throughout art history, artists’ responses to their self, surroundings, and influences of ‘The Other’ in consciousness, have been fascinating. This section features artworks reflecting how artists from different generations have represented the self through abstraction and figuration. Likewise, extending the concept, the search for the self also investigates how the idea of vernacular shapes engagement of figuration and abstraction as artistic exploration. Transitioning from ‘Contentment and Transformation’ to ‘The Self and The Other', it illustrates a move from accumulating the self to proclaiming it.
Moving into the final section, ‘Bodily Embodiments', the focus shifts to understanding how the body becomes an archive and testimonial. Works here explore personal histories, narratives of conflict, and external forces of change that rupture the interior self. As the concluding section, it emphasizes artistic concerns related to affect and memory, where the body absorbs residues of continued events that shape the self's social, cultural, political, and personal identities. Overall, this section offers a spatial understanding that helps us grasp the nuances of the extended body and self, highlighting the poetics of material histories in personal narratives.
The four interconnected sections of this exhibition: ‘Interfacing Interiority’, ‘Contentment and Transformation’, ‘The Self and The Other’, and ‘Bodily Embodiments’, form the core of its curatorial framework, offering experiences that oscillate between individual and collective meanings. This enables us to view similar themes and artistic concerns from different times as coexisting epistemologies. It allows us to build a shared knowledge that enhances the understanding of one’s practice through others. The exhibition invites us to see how different generations engage with similar concerns, creating a space for transitions, overlaps, and contradictions that shape the meaning of the self, body, and interiority across time. Overall, Deep Interior provides a curatorial framework that explores the coexistence of the continuous past and the potential future through the lens of a present that exists as a non-existent phenomenon. Starting from the evolving nature of architectural homogenization and the placelessness of individual autonomy, the sections move through a return to the self through release, action, and transformation, to confronting the other as a form shaping the self. ‘Deep Interiors’ questions where the complete self resides, while offering opportunities for ongoing exploration of self-awareness amid the complexities of our times. As noted earlier, the premise of ‘Deep Interiors’ is not only to examine how artists have historically explored interiority as an intangible, unseen, and often unrealized phenomenon but also to question how witnessing interiority as an external force beyond individual understanding is possible. ‘Deep Interiors- A Return to (Un)Discovered Self’ aims to highlight art’s power to evolve continuously, redefining and reclaiming artistic autonomy while dismantling various corporeal frameworks for imprisoning the self. By challenging traditional ideas of what the self is or is becoming, the exhibition creates space for expansive expressions of subjectivity, where the subconscious can emerge beyond the limits of language.
Read less
