spoiled fruit (2020 - ongoing) brings together photography, language and sound to propose a feminist archive that listens closely to the body’s language. Here, shame and desire coexist in the tender and rebellious language of skin. Over five years, I explore how women’s bodies in India are forged by caste, class, labour and the quiet violence of expectation. The project began with a question I once asked my mother as a child: Is blemished fruit spoiled? “Not spoiled,” she said in Tamil, “just hurt.” That answer, both wound and balm, is woven through the work in its various forms.
In 2019, I tore my ACL while dancing. During surgery and recovery, I was forced into a kind of stillness that filled me with grief and anxiety. I sat with my body and my camera, and began to look at myself, I wanted to try and understand the disconnected, abject relationship I shared with my own body. The feminist critic and philosopher Julia Kristeva describes abjection as the inability to assimilate with the self: when the body feels foreign, alien, almost threatening one’s sense of identity. When I first encountered this language, I realised how important it was for me, and for women to have words that could help us articulate experiences of inclusion and exclusion within our own bodies.
That realisation became a turning point. Photographing myself was not an act of self-display, but a rehearsal in looking and learning how to witness without judgement, how to let the lens become a space of negotiation between shame and tenderness.
What began as a quiet intervention with myself slowly expanded, through a collaborative process with over thirty women across India, into an intimate archive of the body. Much of my practice sits in the space between visibility and refusal. I want us to linger in the inbetween: of what can be shown, what is withheld, and what often remains unresolved.
To request access to the sound piece (5:41 mins), please email sankarvasudha@gmail.com
(Selected images)
‘spoiled fruit’ artist book | Edition of 9 (2 AP) | Self-published
28 loose leaf pages | Photographs printed on Rendezvous Natura | Letterpress printed photograph on Japanese Kozo | 19.05 cm x 21.59 cm
