Performance Resistance
Embedded Files
Performance Resistance is a body of work developed between 2019-2020 during my MFA at Shiv Nadar University. Emerging from the lived conditions of institutional environments - residential campuses, administrative protocols, and spatial regulation - the project examines how bodies are continually configured, normalised, and disciplined through routine interactions with bureaucratic and infrastructural systems.
Working between performance, spatial intervention, and material practice, the series investigates the micro-politics of everyday life within regulated spaces. Rather than framing resistance as overt defiance, the works foreground low-intensity negotiations: minor gestures, material deviations, and spatial reorientations that illuminate the subtle frictions embedded within institutional architectures. These gestures align with Foucault’s “capillary” operations of power-diffuse, habitual, and quietly coercive - while simultaneously invoking Agamben’s notion of “profane” use-acts that deactivate a system precisely through inhabiting it differently.
Rather than proposing a singular critique, Performance Resistance maps a topology of constraint and agency, showing how individuals continually recalibrate the terms of participation within normative frameworks. The project positions everyday acts as critical operations, revealing how infrastructures of control are neither monolithic nor total but perpetually negotiated through embodied, material, and spatial improvisations.
Works in this Series -
1. How to Mock Allowed Hai
2. Ambience of a Place
3. Dadri ki Dari
4. Project Room - Studio 21
5. Ida | Pingala
How to Mock Allowed Hai
Confiscated boxes, students’ clothing, personal effects, printed email
The work began with a night when a doctoral student was stopped at the university gate. Her handbag was searched, and though she was not smoking, her cigarette box was confiscated. She asked, “If possession is forbidden, does the same rule apply to faculty and staff? - a question that exposed the contradiction between surveillance and privilege.
Across the campus one could find discarded gutka packets under trees and in corridors, reminders that discipline was not about health but about visibility and hierarchy.
The installation is made of ordinary cigarette boxes layered with fragments of clothing belonging to students whose rooms were similarly searched — wardrobes opened, belongings handled, even sanitary-pad packets inspected.
Inside the boxes were small personal items: tampons, everyday objects, and in one box, the printed email from the administration that authorised the security checks.
To know what these objects were, viewers had to touch, open, and look inside - repeating the very act of intrusion the work critiques. The piece turns the university’s logic back on itself: the audience becomes the inspector, and the inspection becomes performance. It stages what Michel Foucault called the institutional gaze - where control operates not only through watching but through handling and categorising the intimate.
Each opened box re-enacts the trespass that defines modern governance: touch preceding understanding.
Ambience of a Place
Photographic documentation, collective gesture
Across the campus, students began to wear black nail pain - quietly, persistently. It was not a fashion statement but a chromatic refusal. Black color circulated through classrooms, studios, and cafeterias as a shared, embodied code: a refusal of normative, a marker of fatigue, irony, and solidarity all at once.
In my thesis I described this gesture as part of the ambient atmosphere of the campus - a field of resistance expressed through tone, hue, and presence rather than protest slogans. The black nails absorbed light; they turned the hand into a small political surface. Within the institution’s aesthetic of cleanliness and order, the colour registered as noise - a visual disturbance that could not be easily punished or contained.
The photograph of a hand with black-painted nails documents not a person but a climate - the quiet, diffused affect of resistance made visible through a recurring colour.
Dadri ki Dari
Photograph, handmade carpet, standard furniture
In the university residences, every room was identical: the same bed, the same mattress, the same laminated table. The infrastructure was mass-produced and minimally functional - comfort engineered to a bureaucratic mean. To ease persistent back pain, I replaced the mattress with a hand-woven carpet made by local artisans from Dadri, just outside the campus. Its coarse weave immediately changed the texture of the space; the room smelled of wool and dye instead of vinyl.
When the campus repair workers entered my room, they smiled and said they had done the same with their own mattresses in their quarters within the university housing. That small remark revealed a shared negotiation with the system: the same architecture producing the same discomfort across hierarchies.
The photograph of the carpeted bed later became part of my thesis - a record of how personal adjustment can also be critique. Against the uniform logic of institutional design, the handmade surface stood as evidence of the body’s need to re-author its environment, to write comfort back into a space optimised for sameness.
Touch as both method and metaphor, institution as both frame and subject, and body as both site and witness.
Together they trace the faint line where compliance turns into performance - and where endurance becomes resistance.
Project Room
Rainbow Flag, installation, institutional response
Project rooms are assignments of the MFA programme at SNU. The students are required to respond to a given site through their work.
The university often presented itself as a liberal, inclusive campus - a place that celebrated diversity and conversation.
Yet the everyday realities narrated by students told another story. Through my conversations with members of the Queer Collective an informal university student group I collaborated with - I began to hear accounts of subtle discrimination: delays in approvals for events, questions of “appropriateness” around expression, and a quiet discomfort that accompanied queer presence in certain spaces.
These conversations helped me see how institutions can perform acceptance while sustaining older hierarchies of control. As I wrote in my thesis, “the institutional language of inclusion often hides the machinery of regulation.”
For my project room installation, I placed a rainbow flag at the academic block at SNU - not as decoration but as declaration. It marked the University as a space of listening and belonging.
That night, the flag was taken down by the administration without notice or justification. By then, such bureaucratic interventions had become routine.
A few days later, I hung the same flag again at the entrance of my studio (Studio 21) at F-Block, quietly designating it a safe space. Word spread across campus: Studio 21 is open to anyone who needs to come, sit, and breathe. It became an informal refuge within the architecture of control — a space claimed not by permission but by care.
A year after I graduated, I received a message from younger students who had heard about the incident. They were facing similar resistance and were in dialogue with the administration. I shared with them the same newspaper article I had cited in my thesis — the one that had framed these issues in a broader national context of queer erasure within campuses.
Weeks later, the university and the SNUQC body had reached an agreement, and the flag had been reinstated in the same place where it once stood. The gesture had returned. What was once removed quietly had now been acknowledged publicly.
In their act, I recognised a kind of continuity — the way a simple piece of fabric had travelled through time, becoming a witness to persistence. The flag was never only a symbol of pride. It was, and remains, a sign of ongoing negotiation — of what it means to inhabit, contest, and slowly remake an institution from within.
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