CASP Conversations: Body Politics, Performance, and Social Critique
Schedule
Sat Apr 18 2026 at 06:00 pm to 07:30 pm
UTC+05:30Location
Navi Mumbai (New Mumbai), India, Maharashtra | Navi Mumbai, MH
Advertisement
UPCOMING | CASP CONVERSATIONS In collaboration with Designworks, Navi Mumbai
Speaker: Mansi Bhatt | Artist
Respondent: Amrita Gupta | Art Historian and Co-director, CASP
WHEN: Saturday, 18th April, 2026 | Time: 6.00pm
WHERE: DesignWorks, 607, Bhumiraj Costarica
Sector 18, Sanpada, Navi Mumbai
Tea and Snacks will be served at 5.30pm.
đź“ť Limited Free Seats Available!
Email us at: [email protected]
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 gendered masquerades, her work probes questions of home, territory, migration, identity, urbanity, capital, and belonging. Through this process, she reveals the amalgamated essence of urban identity: cities shaped not by memorials or infrastructure, but by their inhabitants.
Her layered approach uses autoethnography as a feminist methodology, intertwining 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 embodied, immersive performances test physical endurance as a trope, shaping unsettled tableaux - particularly in navigating policed, denied, or violently reclaimed environments.
In this conversation, Mansi presents selected work over 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 weaves her multidisciplinary threads around home and belonging, ultimately exploring the poetics of memory, presence and absence, and acts of remembrance. The artist will also explore the aspects of place, space, and the public in her practice
BIO
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.
For more, please visit www.casp-india.org. Stay tuned for more updates!
Advertisement
Where is it happening?
Navi Mumbai (New Mumbai), India, Maharashtra, New Mumbai Municipal Corporation, C B D Underpass, Sector 11, CBD Belapur, Navi Mumbai 400614, India, Navi MumbaiEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.
