Scars Of A Sick Body

An uncle’s mysterious ailment led Prajakta Potnis to probe the menacing, internal world of an ill body and its contaminated habitats, points out Shweta Upadhyay.

- Shweta Upadhyay

In the poem If I Shut My Eyes, What Other Doors in Me Fly Open, Ben Purkert makes an impossible wish, “I’d like to meet my bones.” The desire for a meeting is hinged on expectations of communication and exchange: a meeting is always social, transactional and consensual between two sentient entities. How do you meet a body organ? Your lungs or your bones? This line expresses the curious and paradoxical relationship that we share with our physical bodies. Each of us is a complex organism carrying an ecosystem inside ourselves, ticking in the dark, yet we hardly ever see them. Prajakta Potnis’s show A Body Without Organs at Project 88, Mumbai, from the 12th of March to the 15th of September, makes it possible to ‘meet’ this obscure, internal world.

It is not an actual body that Potnis depicts. Potnis has borrowed the idea of the ‘body without organs’ from the works of French philosophers Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, who formulated this concept over many books including Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. The term, in the sense Potnis uses it, is defined in one of the texts, as a deterritorialized body, a fluid entity, that was beyond its social and biological functions. It was a collection of traits, intensities, and effects.

Potnis stages found objects constructed or sculpted together to resonate a body or an organ. She uses everyday objects and exposes them through radioactive rays that result in interiorscapes signifying various tissues, surfaces, and organs inside the body. Through the principle of mirroring and theatre, she explores the body from the inside out. The series titled