A pioneer of performance art in India reflects on her decades-long journey

Today, every major Indian art event, be it a biennial or a fair, features performance artworks in its programme. But despite the form’s contemporary boom, its history in India is still inchoate. As art historian Rakhee Balaram says in a 2022 essay, “The genesis of performance art in India, including the histories of the 1980s, has yet to be written…”

One person who is all too familiar with this history is Ratnabali Kant, a pioneer of performance art and, as art historian Partha Mitter points out, the first Indian artist to synthesise performance and installation.

Kant’s contra-proscenium practice emerged in the 1980s at the same time as Sushil Kumar’s, groundbreaking Veil (1985), an undocumented performance at New Delhi’s Tilak Bridge Railway station, confronted the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms. While very different from each other, these works together marked the full-fledged appearance of a form which, as Balaram points out, had long been gestured towards in India – for example, by Jeram Patel’s blowtorched “action paintings” of the 1960s and Bhupen Khakhar’s photo-performance series of 1972.

Between 1985 and 2005, Kant developed a series of “performance installations” that were among the first such manifestations of the genre in India and part of a foundational archive of contemporary Indian performance art. Trained as a...

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