Antevasin: the one who sits at the border of two worlds marks Richi Bhatia’s first solo exhibition at Gallery Isabelle, presenting a body of work that moves between drawing, performance, object-making, food interventions, and assemblage. Working across India and the United Arab Emirates, Bhatia engages with liminality, disrupting the normative categories that shape our understanding of the world and its human and nonhuman relations.
The exhibition unfolds as a series of porous encounters between lifeworlds and death worlds, where beauty and obscenity often coexist. Anchored in ethnographic and auto-ethnographic research, Bhatia’s practice takes fish and meat markets as a key site of inquiry. Her works trace the bodily and material labour embedded in the food industry, moving between markets and studios, composition and decomposition, the intimate and the infrastructural.
In The Animals, The Bodies, and Coefficient of Time (2025), shelters made from fish scales echo temporary worker accommodations in Dubai and India. Prone to Change… (2025) presents ceramic sausages and processed meat forms that appear abstracted from the bodies that produced them. A three-channel video work, The Girl, the Donkey, and an Elixir for Life… (2022–25), stages a multispecies performance in Leh, reflecting on gender, domestic labour, and the animal labour embedded in traditional butter-making.
Elsewhere, Bhatia interlaces strands of her own hair with market workers’ words in Include Some, Exclude Others (2025), a tactile and multilingual installation combining raw ojhri, melting market ice, and ceramics. Across sculptures, moving images, and text, Bhatia’s work invites audiences into an active sensorium, one in which discomfort is part of the methodology.
Antevasin: one who sits at the border of two worlds emerges as a central figure. Through this position, Bhatia articulates not separation, but the possibility of reflection, exchange, and transformation.
Location: Gallery Isabelle, Dubai, UAE.
Date: 15 June till 10 September 2025