About the Actant
© Bhagwati Prasad
Bhagwati Prasad works with drawing and performance. He conducted extensive research with Sarai/CSDS on Delhi’s popular culture, water wars, and media life (2002-12), and his books include Tinker. Solder. Tap. (co-authored, 2009) and The Water Cookbook (2010). He is known for his large scale-wall drawings, notabaly at Jaipur Kala Kendra (2018), and his Hashtag series has proliferated on social media since 2017. He has performed at the Shanghai Biennale (2017) and Serendipity (Goa, 2017). He has been part of many local and international residencies, and was the recipient of IFA’s Artist Practice Grant (2015-17). His most recent work Begumpura Series, in which he revisits the egalitarian imaginary of saint Ravidas, showed at MACBA, Barcelona (2018). He has conducted studios and workshops in institutional and university contexts, among them Ambedkar University (Delhi). A conversation about his work and life was recently published in the drawing journal, FUKT (Issue#18, Berlin, September 2019).
© Bhagwati Prasad
The Stutter of Food is an invitation into the difficulty of the speech about food. What leaves the tongue? Both as word, and as flesh. In 2017, there was a happenstance moment in a restaurant during my travel to Shanghai, when I discovered pig intestines served on the table, their taste uncannily familiar, close to what my mother used to make at home. And even as I realized I had not spoken about this food in Delhi so far, I found that in that moment all of us on the table had come upon an intermediate place – a detour, a suddenness, a taste, an affinity. Pitching a tent in the Goethe –Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan lawns, layering it with animal skins, I will draw on it, over days, a merging of worlds of animal, techne, and habitat – song lines conversing with the Begumpura of Ravidas, ‘a world without sorrow’. This tent is both a habitat and a staging; when it is ready, I will cook all day outside it, in a large cauldron, meats with spices and a recipe both familiar and invented. We will all share the meal.
