What if learning and unlearning could feel like a spell? Like letting go? Like dancing through fire?

Disco Inferno takes its title from a popular anthem of ecstatic release, a scene of a fire in a top-floor ballroom and a loose translation. I learn through suffering. It’s a phrase that flickers between pop spectacle and something slower, more interior. On one level, it conjures the dancefloor - a site of freedom, rhythm, and communal transcendence. On another, it speaks to the transformative textures of pain, repetition, and ritual. This exhibition moves between these registers, bringing together three artists - Nithya Iyer, Asha Maria Madge, and Leo Bagus Purnomo - whose practices engage in layered, often embodied ways, with memory, identity, ancestry.

The idea of movement - across bodies, borders, and belief systems - threads through the exhibition. Nithya’s two-channel video work Sītā anchors the show with a poetic excavation of diasporic inheritance and feminine visibility. Drawing from the Hindu epic Ramayana, Nithya stages the performative act of digging and lying in her own grave - a gesture both symbolic and corporeal. The grave here becomes not only a site of mourning, but a threshold; a furrow that marks and un-marks territory, identity, and time. Her merging of mythic and personal lineages suggests an alternate passage for South Indian diasporic women. One in which fragmentation can also be a site of reclamation.

In dialogue with this, Asha’s paintings offer a sensorial counterpoint. Her layered and gestural works meditate on the slippages between memory and place, abstraction and the body. Asha paints from a perspective shaped by geographic and cultural transience, allowing multiple temporalities, textures, and registers to coexist. Her work resists linearity, embracing instead a kind of painterly improvisation that echoes the visual rhythms of dream, movement, and sensual recall. What emerges is a painted archive of feeling and fugitive memory.

Leo’s installation practice expands these ideas into the atmospheric and the mystical. His fabric-based works, accompanied by the lingering scent of jasmine, conjure thresholds into unseen worlds. Drawing from Javanese mysticism, conceptual art, and critical theory, Leo’s work probes the porousness of identity. Refusing static representation in favour of multiplicity and the ineffable. His approach reflects an ongoing interest in epistemic crossings: where inherited knowledge systems meet posthuman and spiritual frameworks; to disrupt and reimagine what it means to belong.

These artists resist the instrumentalisation of identity demanded by institutional diversity frameworks. Their works illustrate complex, embodied practices that ask us to sit with the messier, more human parts of who we are. Nithya, Asha, and Leo offer more than representation; they’re offering transformation! Suggesting how art might generate new methods of knowing, and new forms of movement, both within and beyond the self.

Image | Still from Sīta (2023), a two-channel projection installation (9′14″) by Nithya Iyer, created during a residency at AADK, with shooting and editorial support from Vlad Mizikov.

Unseen Threads is a personal exploration of identity, change, and the quiet significance of the everyday. This body of work began through simple acts of observation and self-reflection - watching, noting, and responding to the shifting rhythms of daily life.

These paintings engage with the subtle, often overlooked moments that shape our inner worlds. A passing light, a change in season, a feeling that arrives without explanation - through abstraction, these fragments are given form, yet remain open to interpretation. Ambiguity becomes a space of generosity, inviting viewers to bring their own memories and emotional landscapes into dialogue with the work.

The series resists resolution. Just as life refuses to stay still, so too do these paintings embrace flux and uncertainty. In this way, Unseen Threads becomes a visual meditation on transition - on how we evolve, unravel, and re-form, moment by moment.

Rainbow Dissection explores the intersection of queer identity, futurism, and the symbolism of the rainbow, using vibrant imagery to examine visibility, resilience, and community. Through a series of three large-scale banners categorised into sex and gender, sexualities, and community and futurism - Nicky's banners reimagine queer symbols as evolving narratives of pride and possibility. These works draw upon the rich history of protest banners and pride flags, celebrating their role in shaping queer visibility while questioning how they might evolve to represent future aspirations.

A key part of the process involved categorising and sorting existing pride flags, using their established colours as a foundation for each banner. By drawing directly from these visual languages, these works explore how the colours that have historically signified diverse queer identities can be re-contextualised into new, expansive forms. The banners layer and remix these hues, creating dynamic compositions that reflect both individual and collective experiences within the queer community.

The banners serve as both a reflection of lived experiences and an exploration of the complexities of queer identity in a world still structured by rigid binaries. Each banner purposely uses bold colour, dynamic composition, and layered textures to evoke the vibrancy, joy, and defiance of queer existence.

By reframing and expanding on the traditional iconography of queer activism, these works envision a future where queerness is not just seen but integral - a force that actively shapes culture, community, and the way we imagine our collective future. Through this series, Nicky invites viewers to consider how symbols of queerness can continue to evolve, fostering new conversations about identity, representation, and belonging in an ever-changing world.

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