Bureaucracy and Institutions

People think that bureaucracy is only about the resolution (or constitution) of power in hierarchy. Bureaucracy, essentially is an institutional by-product. In the process of institutionalization, systems are set, with checkpoints at various levels. These systems leverage intervention by human intellect and allow a so called consistency of decision-making. In bureaucratic processes, humans become monitors rather than decision-makers, therefore taking away their agency to feel a part of the process. In this situation, the disposal of human beings out does not feel impedimental to an institution, because the essential aspects of intervention are now vested into the non-human bureaucracy - a protocol that must be followed objectively. After all, the human being merely reduced to a place holder to execute the operations of an organization.

But bureaucracy also has one more tact. Firstly, all workers within the bureaucratic system are expected to speak in the language of the protocol. When bureaucratic system produces redundancies or unexpected level of (un)productivity, the system is scrutinized. Here, the weak link is supposed to be identified to be replaced, repaired or removed in order for the smooth delivery of the product. The in-flexibility of a bureaucratic system automatically begins to highlight the different modal operations of individual people running the system. Here, the people who do not align to the defined system begin to feel a double separation - one is from the system itself, and second is from the peers or people who have seemingly managed to forego their agency to the power of the system.

Bureaucratic systems - in a manner of corollary - are not (necessarily) designed through collective identification of strengths. They are often designed by a source of power to maximize efficiency and productivity. Here, the person/group in power automatically gets the final say on who appears to be the weak link. This weak link in the chain of delivery is identified based on his/her deviation or non-alignment, that is believed to cause poor contribution. We must take note here, how the weakness of the individual is now measured in reference to the invented system, and not in terms of his/her own individual original capacity - a capacity that may be able to offer value for any operation essential to the institution in much varied and other critical ways. This individual invariably is a double victim (of external institutional reprimand, and internal self-doubt)

On another line of thought, bureaucratic systems also helps softening the blame on a person by routing it through the frame of the system. Then, the system speaks its own language to communicate to the individual how they may not "fit in" or "non-contributors" to the system. This, in the system's frame is labelled as non-performance, and annotated as a failure for the productive engine of the institution. The bureaucracy keeps record of deviations. It has invented its rubric, and the record, not the intent, is the truth, the weapon of mobilizing decisions. Records! Institutional records! 

Bureaucratic apparatuses compel people to speak in languages that must not take individual names, and to the bettering of this engine - which is yet a flat line, to which others must align. The degree of alignment shall suggest your growth in this system. 

At an earlier time and place, I had gotten very interested in articulating how institutions are predominantly heteronormative. In thinking so, I believe that bureaucratization of an institutional apparatus is not only done to streamline its operations, but it also maintains a certain power, status quo and the longevity project. The queer imagination of institutional foundation would not necessarily be oriented towards maintaining legacy, rather making the present better and worthy of survival. A lot needs to be thought and studied about this claim, but I fundamentally feel that queer futures - or futures imagined through queer bodies do not have teleological trajectories and are necessarily multivalent and pluriversal. Therefore, their struggle is to create broader fields of accommodation rather than sharper projects of what i understand as patriarchy.

I wanted to articulate through this post the relative experience of an individual vis-a-vis a bureaucratic apparatus, the way bureaucracies affect languages and relational experiences, and lastly their translation into the institutional imagination. I also understand that this must be written as a much longer post to elaborate upon each of these aspects, that seem to be rather impressionistic here.

Amphibian Aesthetics - Art in the Age of Precarity

a group exhibition
presented by Ishara Art Foundation
conceptualized and designed by Aazhi Archives
The Ishara House at Kashi Hallegua House, Kochi, Kerala

13 December 2025 to 31 March 2026

Amphibian Aesthetics emerges from the urgencies of precarity in the Anthropocene—climate collapse, displacement, extinction, and hyper-capital—where questions of survival and radicality become inseparable from artistic practice. The exhibition unsettles familiar binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, embracing entangled, rhizomic ways of thinking that refuse fixed hierarchies. The ‘amphibian’ stands as a figure of adaptability and shared vulnerability, moving between land and water, past and future, human and more-than-human worlds. Building on earlier explorations of Kerala’s oceanic histories—of migration, trade, and climatic shifts—Amphibian Aesthetics presents these entanglements as sites of both crisis and possibility. In foregrounding water’s agency and multispecies coexistence, the exhibition invites multisited and multimodal ways of imagining collective futures. Here, art becomes not merely a mirror to the world but an amphibious gesture—fluid, resilient, and attuned to the fragile ecologies that shape our shared survival.

The exhibition brings together 12 artists and collectives from South Asia, the Middle East and Europe, who play with the emerging precarities of our planet, suggesting multiple modes of being. It explores the aspects of ‘amphibian’ as an artful way of mediating migrations and exile, memory and history, traditions and identities across time and space.

Participating Artists \ Appupen, CAAS Collective (Dr Susmita Mohanty, Rohini Devasher, Sue Fairburn and Barbara Imhof), Dima Srouji, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Midhun Mohan, Rami Farook, Ratheesh T, Kabir Project (Shabnam Virmani, Anisha Baid and Smriti Chanchani), Shanvin Sixtous, Shilpa Gupta, White Balance and Zahir Mirza.

Visit the Exhibition Website

Exhibition Plan

Four Motions in Freedom - Bangalore Hubba 2026

FOUR MOTIONS IN FREEDOM
A video art project for Bangalore Hubba, 16-25 Jan 2026
18 artists / 20 videos

Abeer Khan / Amol Patil / B V Suresh / Babu Eshwar Prasad / Bharati Kapadia / Gigi Scaria / Katyayini Gargi / L N Tallur / Mrudula Kunatharaju / Parul Gupta / Pragati Dalvi Jain / Sheeba Chhachhi / Shreya Menon / Soghra Khurasani / Sukanya Ghosh / Surekha / Swagata Bhattacharyya / Vidya Kamat


Curatorial Note

This project examines various aspects of freedom through experimental video art by Indian contemporary artists. How does the notion of freedom occur in the work of the visual artist? The proposition ‘Four Motions in Freedom’ alludes to the structure of the symphony in western classical orchestra that interprets “freedom” as both a compositional structure and a political condition. The motion clips structurally presented in four sections of this curatorial schema also reference the four pillars of democracy and the four seasons that broadly occur during the cyclic period of a year - both that see a wave of change in our present politics and climate. These four motions — fast and slow, balanced and improvisatory — create the polyphonic field in which democracy breathes. Freedom here is not a single melody but a composition in flux, sustained by dialogue, friction, and repetition. Like any living music, its power lies not in resolution but in the continual act of listening, responding, and renewal.

The four vectors of freedom, explored through four video-sets here are:

 
a. BODY
This set explores works that look at the body as the first site of negotiation of freedom. The artists explore gestures of vulnerability or pleasure within the gendered, ritualised or surveilled body. Largely speaking of the feminine struggles, the section brings voices that claim for presence or autonomy and ultimately agency for the suppressed body.

 
b. TENSION
Oscillating between danger and play, this section highlights the tensions of exercising freedom. The works present contrasting ways of staging and dealing with one’s internal conflict. Freedom here is demonstrated in acts of release and restraint. When restrained, the works offer us new questions in stretching further the geography of the trapped mind.

 
c. ROUTINE
The works in this set present histories and actions that are silenced in the everyday acts of repetition. Some not only reveal the routines in which our lives unendingly circulate, but also offer us alternative ways in which we (may) begin to creatively maneuver them. They settle and unsettle the timespaces we inhabit, ultimately hinting at the quiet subversion of the mundane everyday.

d. IDEOLOGY
In this section, artists pose questions to the actions of ideological regimes that have led us to reflect on the political landscapes that the world is confronted with. The works interrogate different aspects of the violence of data, democratic ideals and distilled ethics and its impact on communities and societies.


VIDEO LIST

SCREEN – I BODY 5 videos Total: 14 mins 19 secs

1. Mrudula Kunatharaju TRY TRY TRY 2.30

2. Mrudula Kunatharaju STILL SMALL VOICE 1.40

3. Soghra Khurasani I WANT TO LIVE 1.01

4. Soghra Khurasani DO THIS, DO THAT 3.18

5. Vidya Kamat WISH I HAD STAYED HOME 5.50

SCREEN – II TENSION 5 videos Total: 20 mins 30 secs

1. Parul Gupta HAIRFALL 5.48

2. Surekha LOC 2.31

3. Pragati Dalvi Jain BREAKING THE IMAGE 6.59

4. Bharati Kapadia PLAYING WITH DANGER 2.12

5. Sukanya Ghosh ISOSCELES FOREST 03.00

SCREEN – III ROUTINE 5 videos Total: 17 mins 46 secs

1. Abeer Khan CHILD LOCK 2.12

2. Sheba Chhachhi MOVING THE CITY 6.58

3. Katyayini Gargi THE REITERATORS 2.05

4. L N Tallur INTERFERENCE 4.00

5. Amol Patil REST 02.31

SCREEN – IV IDEOLOGY 5 videos Total: 21 mins 19 secs

1. Shreya Menon RABBIT HOLE 1.41

2. Gigi Scaria POLITICAL FREEDOM 3.31

3. B. V. Suresh CANES OF WRATH 3.17

4. Swagata Bhattacharyya ROAD SCENE 4.18

5. Babu Eshwar Prasad WALK 8.32

Read full descriptions here

epilogue

As we complete fifty years since the Emergency of 1975, and while the world sways to the extreme political currents across the world, to ask about freedom is more pertinent now than ever. The global reconfigurations around us affect us at various scales of existence - both the self and the world, the body and action. How does the notion of freedom occur in the work of the visual artist? Through what routes does the artist lead us into thinking about our social, political and historical entrappings? Lastly, how could these be mobilised into ways of imagining and actioning for a more agile everyday?

Located in the Central Business district of the city of Bengaluru, the erstwhile Bangalore Central Jail, now the Freedom Park becomes a historical and phenomenological condition for this artistic intersection. The site has held several opposition leaders including poet prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L K Advani when the state of emergency was proclaimed in India in 1975. More recently, it was the ground for hosting the India Against Corruption campaign supporting Anna Hazare’s indefinite fast for governmental action that led to the enactment of the Lok Pal Bill that extended the people of India, the will to ask questions freely to power. Opened in 2008, a part of this site has also been allotted for public protests and free political expression. As viewers encounter the show in the prison cells of the Freedom Park in Bangalore, ‘Four motions in Freedom’ invites contemplation on the histories and futures of our very artistic and collective freedom.

Figure, Field and Fact - Shilpi Rajan Retrospective

 

On Marginality

This morning I saw in the Mumbai locals, an elderly couple possibly on a rare visit to the city. The woman sitting close to her husband, both bodies conscious of their marginality, discomfortingly occupying the space even when the third seat was empty. The woman looked around with amazement, her twinkling eyes hinting me to see other women in the passing train, with wonder. The man, seemingly focused towards his destination, holding his composure, with a plastic bag bearing the picture of our current prime minister.

The overall scene triggered how a certain orientation of space, a social imagination of the self, and the societal expectation of the body rests together in our corporeality and it gets released in the material world...

New Year - Art in the age of Precarity

Inspired from the wall text installation of Shilpi Rajan's show curated by Aazhi Archives at the Uru Art Harbour in Mattancherry, Fort Kochi, this graphic was developed to suggest foraying our entry into a new year of precarity. 

As Dhruv tried to install the vinyl text onto the freshly dried white painted wall of the recently acquired space of Uru Art Harbour, the surface and the text behaved rather unruly producing an even geography of pasts and presents. Sitting uncomfortably, each layer seemed equally precarious, struggling to exist and yet not. 

The next morning, Dhruv and his team came up with a unique way to repair the introduction wall text. The older letters were removed, the wall was repainted, the vinyl text was reprinted. Yet, the problem persisted. This time, they printed out missing parts of the text on white paper and patched it up onto the wall with glue. The recalcitrant moisture in the walls, the peeling paint and the rough surface - all struggled to support each other. Could this be what we might understand as the essential difficulty of co-existence?

The resultant aesthetic, probably resonant with Shilpi's own trajectory, played a persistent poetry of fracture. Simultaneously suggesting a fracture of language, art and the world, this emergent expression of the wall text framed a metaphorical prelude to the show, that itself was placed in a broader thematic of art in the age of precarity.

With appendages, supplements, affixtures, work still goes on. Yet, this is not to valorize precarity of infrastructure or delay as design. This is to highlight how fugitive feelings of materials can produce fractures that cannot be mended easily, and perhaps there are longer histories that need to be addressed while curating for art in the age of precarity.

Look at the images of Shilpi Rajan's show here.