I began noticing bodies while thinking about belief.
In religious spaces across India, it is the body that arrives first, before language, before doctrine, before intention. It knows how to slow down at a threshold, when to lower its gaze, where to place its hands. These movements are rarely taught explicitly. They are absorbed over time, learned through repetition, proximity, correction, and imitation. The body remembers what the mind does not need to articulate.
This work grows out of sustained time spent observing these learned gestures. I am less interested in religion as theology than in religion as a choreography, how faith, hierarchy, humility, fear, devotion, and belonging are performed physically in shared spaces. Belief becomes visible not through symbols alone, but through posture: bent spines, folded hands, lowered chins, stillness held in public.
Indian religious sites are among the clearest places where social order is made visible on the body. Who sits on the floor and who occupies raised platforms. Who moves freely and who waits. Who touches the sacred and who keeps a careful distance. These distinctions are rarely announced, yet they are rigorously maintained. The body learns where it belongs long before it understands why.
Much of this is repetitive by design. Circumambulation, prostration, standing and sitting in rhythm.. Ritual trains the body through repetition until belief settles into muscle memory. Over time, movement becomes automatic. Devotion persists even when attention drifts. In these moments, the individual body dissolves briefly into a collective rhythm, held together by habit more than conviction.
What strikes me repeatedly is the restraint or lack of, that governs these spaces.
These are spaces of remarkable intimacy with the sacred. People press their foreheads into stone, grip railings and thresholds, whisper private fears in public, shout out and express their bodies in ways which are not allowed in regular everyday life. The sacred becomes something tactile, relational, met through contact, gestures, sounds, and weight rather than abstraction. This intimacy exists alongside contact between human bodies, creating a tension that feels exhilerating and creates an air of suspension of belief. Where we don’t know what is to be expected next.
Gendered expectations are also written into posture. Women’s bodies are often taught to fold inward, to take up less space, to remain contained and watchful. Men’s bodies, more often, move outward, directive and mobile. In some cases women have prescribed spaces where they are allowed to let go of societal expectations, and there is a great breaking of the dam, a freeing of the spirit and under the watchful eyes of family they perform an exhileration of the body, a letting go of all sense of deocrum.
By paying attention to these movements, I am interested in what they reveal about who we are allowed to be, where we are permitted to stand, and how deeply history settles into the way we carry ourselves through the world.
2019 - Ongoing.