Gallery Isabelle has organised Antevasin – the one who sits at the border of two worlds, a profound solo exhibition by Indian artist Richi Bhatia. Running through 10 September 2025, the show, which borrows its title from Sanskrit, features a body of work that moves between drawing, performance, object-making, food interventions, and assemblage.
Bhatia, who works across her home country and the Emirates, explores liminality, challenging conventional perceptions of human and nonhuman relationships. Grounded in ethnographic and auto-ethnographic research, the artist’s practice centres on fish and meat markets as spaces of inquiry. Through her art, she traces the labour, both bodily and material, woven into the food industry, navigating the intersections of markets and studios, composition and decay, the personal and the systemic.
Bhatia’s exhibited art pieces invite viewers into an active sensorium, one in which discomfort is part of the methodology. Among the works is The Animals, The Bodies, and Coefficient of Time (2025), a series of shelters made from fish scales that echo temporary worker accommodations in Dubai and India. Also on view is Prone to Change… (2025), a work comprising ceramic sausages and processed meat forms that appear abstracted from the bodies that produced them.
Visitors can watch The Girl, the Donkey, and an Elixir for Life… (2022–25), Bhatia’s three-channel video piece that stages a multispecies performance in Leh (India). The work reflects on such themes as gender, domestic labour, and the animal labour embedded in traditional butter-making.
Also among the highlights is Table – Bed ii (2025), an installation where the tablescape and its utensils become mutable sites of transformation. The installation combines artworks, such as small ceramic forms reminiscent of salami, and market-sourced materials (animal hide, melting fish market ice, etc.). Here, food is a sustainer of life and a site of suffering.
About the artist
Richi Bhatia (b. 1989, New Delhi, India) is a Dubai-based visual artist whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, digital art, assemblage, installation, performance, and food. She received a BFA (2013) from the Surat School of Fine Arts (Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, India) and an MFA (2015) from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (India). Bhatia also earned a PG Diploma in Curatorial Studies of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum (Mumbai, India, 2018).
Bhatia’s work examines labour-intensive processes, walking, research, and hand-making. She employs the body as a medium: uses it as an ever-sensing tool responding to memory, food, technology, and environment to explore the social fabric we inhabit. Her practice is rooted in the act of transformation, catalysed by her experience with a skin condition. The artist explores meat and fish markets and sees them as stages where the private and public meet, and where human-animal interactions unfold in sanitised and performative settings.
Bhatia has participated in various exhibitions, including I Wish to be Happy, I Want to be Yellow (Gallery Isabelle, Dubai, 2024); SPATIAL POEM NO. 5 as part of Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus (Japan Society Gallery, New York, USA, 2023); and A Matter of Materials as part of Delhi Art (Art Centrix Space, New Delhi, 2022), to name a few.
Bhatia has taken part in residencies at Alserkal Arts Foundation (Dubai), LAMO (Leh), Space 118 (Mumbai), Blueprint12 (Vadodara), and Sandarbh 39 (Partapur, Rajasthan, India). In 2013, she won the Best Display Award from the Surat School of Fine Arts,
To get more information about Antevasin, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in exploring Mauka to Makai by Shingo Yamazaki and Samur by Zheng Bo.
To stay connected with the latest art news, consider joining our Telegram channel.
