Hollywood, Los Angeles
Tarini Sethi
Speaking With the Same Tongue
Rajiv Menon ContemporaryIn the work of Delhi-based artist Tarini Sethi, the body becomes a site of infinite possibility. Drawing from India’s expansive art-historical canon, spanning miniature painting to tribal traditions, Sethi constructs a universe entirely of her own making. Inspired by Indian conceptions of the sacred, particularly the multi-limbed deities and their mounts, she imagines evolutionary futures shaped by bodies unbound by fixed notions of identity, biology, or form itself. Sethi offers a vision of Indofuturism that is at once startling and seductive, utopian yet deeply psychosexual. Eroticism and abjection entwine within her compositions, where bodies are simultaneously erogenous and confrontational. While grounded in the aesthetic traditions of the subcontinent, her work reaches toward something more primal and universal, probing the uneasy intersections of power, pleasure, grotesqueness, and the sacred. Across various works on paper, Sethi employs precise, historically grounded modes of mark-making to evoke bodily form and sensation. Rather than merely imagining new deities within an established pictorial canon, she asserts entirely new modes of sensory experience. In Sethi’s vision, the body is capable of anything, inviting viewers to reimagine their most primordial senses, feelings, and urges. Her compositions unfold cosmologies: universes that contain unstoppable bodies, bodies that contain unending universes. Tarini Sethi (b. 1987, India) lives and works in New Delhi, India. She holds a BFA in drawing from Pratt Institute, New York. Solo exhibitions include A Memory of the Future, Galerie Geek/Art, Tokyo, Japan (2024); Do They See The Same Skies As We Do, Chemould CoLab, Mumbai, India (2023); and Of Flesh and Fog, India International Centre, New Delhi, India (2017). Group exhibitions include Like Share Subscribe, Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles, USA (2024); Voices Of Women, Art Garde Global, New Delhi, India (2024); Now Streaming, Rajiv Menon Contemporary, Los Angeles, USA (2024); India Art, Architecture, and Design Biennale, New Delhi, India (2023); In The Absence Of Darkness, 47A, Mumbai, India (2023); A Moveable Feast, Bikaner House, New Delhi, India (2022); and All Is Not Lost 20:20:20, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, India (2020).