Aluminium foil, aluminium sand-casting, process book (photographs, text, video stills, sketches)

Having trained as a designer, Bhavneet brings a unique understanding of space and orientation to her project as she thinks through her own experience of psychosomatic pain while living in the Netherlands. being with looks at the ways in which the body records and remembers pain in environments that forcibly restrain its sensorially attuned ways of knowing and being from drawing upon a lush and generative relationship with nature. In Eindhoven during this period, she began to see atta as a source of nourishment, finding that even the simple act of kneading it was capable of making the body feel more present, through rhythms that evoked familiarity and care, in the face of a fraught encounter with extraction. 

At Khoj, much of her process was led by a search for the medium that could hold the weight of this story’s affective core. Arriving then at aluminium complicated and enriched the modalities of her inquiry—its malleability as foil lending itself to the construction of knots in the body, its grainy texture as sand-casting evoking the materiality of atta. Aluminium that wraps the roti, aluminium that is used in pain-healing, aluminium that is mined and mined and plundered: being with takes a deeply engaged look at the material’s complexity, pushing Bhavneet’s practice further into mindful interrogations of medium, while presenting intuitive ways of feeling and knowing the body and its memory.