2022 MFA Thesis Exhibition

For you and me is a choreography of desire—desire to perform, desire to move, and a desire to be present and absent at the same time—and a dance of closeness. The work represents the tension between the interior and exterior. The objects together evoke abstracted bodily states and, through the functional apparatus of a whistle, bodily functions like breathing. Each object is a container, vessel, and instrument. The metal evokes rigidity and tension with the softness of clay. The crocheted pieces of yarn act as instances of care at the points of contact. All of the sculptures are in relation to the artist’s own body—like prosthetic extensions, evoking her absence. The clay functions as a map, trace, and evidence of her body in movement.

An accompanying video, Every song is really the same song, portrays the performance of breathing that surrounds the work. The performance is about the everyday movement of performing resistance, tiredness, and failure. The force from the performers’ breath goes through the mouth of a whistle. The whistles, even though they produce the same sound, have different bodies and performers become an extension of these clay bodies. “Whistle blowing” is an individual act. Yet clay is a material from the earth. A grounding of some sorts. The performance creates a shared space where the possibility of moving together exists.

Lipika Bhargava (b.1993, New Delhi, India) is a multi-media artist working across drawing, ceramics, textile, performance, 2D and 3D animation. She is currently anMFA candidate in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design/The New School, with a full President’s Scholarship. Her work oscillates between personal-political and reality-fiction. In her work, she explores different themes of sexuality, love, identity, fear, and political choreography of the body. Drawing from her background in Dance (Indian classical and contemporary), her practice is process-oriented and performative in mark-making. Her work has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, Hindustan Times, Scroll.in, and Cosmopolitan.