NEW YORK, NY.- On Thursday, September 5th from 6–8 pm, CUE Art opens This Fire That Warms You, a solo exhibition by artist Tsohil Bhatia with mentorship from Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo). The exhibition will remain on view at CUE’s gallery space at 137 W. 25th Street until October 19, 2024. Attendance during gallery hours (Wed–Sat, 12–6 pm) is free; no reservations are required. The opening reception is free and open to all; RSVPs are encouraged.
This Fire That Warms You imagines the gallery as a kitchen, activating and recontextualizing its furnishings, ingredients, methods, and labor. Bhatia engages in transmodal ways of making that consider the everyday and the ephemeral. Their ongoing studio and kitchen practices converge, revealing excerpts and observations of their daily life through sculpture and installation-based works.
The exhibition sets a stage for something that is yet to happen—or perhaps that has already taken place. Bhatia constructs a scenography that serves as a backdrop to study and reperform domestic and emotional labor. Repurposed kitchenware hangs from the ceiling; dried fruits and vegetables are self-actualized through decay; pressure cookers erupt with sound and steam; surfaces bear evidence of cuts, spills, and burns. Remnants of labor hint at the presence of a body and its ghost. In its absence, however, time becomes a central character—measured in odor, hissing, running water, and discoloration. Abstracted rituals unfold without instruction, enabling a form of mourning that both facilitates memory and anticipates loss.
In the work, fire becomes a metaphor and a vector. Bhatia explores its multiplicities, from anger and rage to passion, desire, comfort, care, danger, violence, and destruction. In the kitchen, fire is disciplined; its functional uses abound. This domestication, however, gives way to moments of unpredictability, to instances in which its latent qualities become visible. Through the work, Bhatia evokes movements and processes that embody the dynamic potential of this fire, calling for an embrace—but also a warning—of the paradoxes it contains.
This Fire That Warms You is Bhatia’s first solo exhibition in New York City, and comes on the heels of their participation in the Fire Island Artist Residency and a solo exhibition at Blueprint 12 in Delhi, India. The exhibition extends beyond the walls of the gallery with Untitled (Rano), a sculptural work on view at NADA House on Governors Island. Through the works presented in these projects, a queer domesticity takes hold, one that is deeply personal to the artist. Bhatia sets alight the forms, movements, and spaces we think we know, allowing for transformative action in the kitchen and beyond.
Tsohil Bhatia (b. New Delhi, India) is an artist, homemaker, and educator currently based in Lenapehoking, now known as New York City. They received an MFA at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University (2020), and their practice thinks through sculpture, performance, and the kitchen. Bhatia’s work emerges from contemplations about the latencies of mundane objects, rituals, and images—bringing together the complexities of the everyday, and of the body’s relationship with time and the space it inhabits. In some of their recent work, they have counted their breath, measured a day’s worth of water from a leaky faucet, mapped light from a window, collected and evaporated water from the five oceans, intuitively counted the seconds of a clock, and swum towards a setting sun. They are a co-founder of Red Flower Collective, a communal eating and food research collective that hosts free and affordable multicourse meals in NYC. Bhatia has been awarded residencies at Fire Island Artist Residency (2024), Center for Book Arts (2022), Oxbow Summer Residency (2021), Chautauqua Artist Residency (2021), 1 Shanthi Road Residency, and HH Art Space (India). Their work has been shown at the University of British Columbia, Twelve Gates Arts, Queer Arts Festival, Franconia Sculpture Park, Hair+Nails, and the Warhol Museum. They are represented by Blueprint12 Gallery (India).
