I don’t have a very strong memory of my childhood, so I rely on photographs to remind me of events, incidents, accidents, and celebrations. In photographs of my younger self, I’m climbing doorways with my toothpick legs, a toothy smile, and my hair helter-skelter; I’m holding trophies under the scorching sun in pristine white shorts; in another, I’m hanging off a bunk bed I shared with my sister, wearing an off-shoulder cotton shimmi in what must have been a sweltering summer. Those early photographs became more than evidence of memory — they became a kind of witness when recollection falters. There was a curiosity I once inhabited, an unthinking trust that my body was with me, carrying me from step to step, jump to leap. But as I grew up, that sense of abandon was replaced by a strong sense of caution. I became aware of its presence and its weight through various warnings and comments (sit like this, don’t answer back, don’t wear this, that dress is too short, miss thunder thighs); forms of policing masked as protection, of how I should perform, eat, and present myself. Somewhere along the way, my sense of curiosity protected me. It encouraged me to ask questions and resist the norms enforced on me. This early negotiation between curiosity and control became the ground of my artistic inquiry — how a body learns to hold itself, how it unlearns obedience, and how those small acts of defiance become its earliest language. In many ways, spoiled fruit grew from this realisation — that photography, sound, and language could hold the contradictions of memory. They could create an archive that allowed for both fracture and continuity. In that sense, spoiled fruit attends to the body as an archive — a site where tenderness and defiance coexist. Through photography, language, and sound, I explore how women’s bodies in India are forged by caste, class, labour, and the quiet violence of expectation. In each image and voice, I gather gestures that resist the demand for polish, framing imperfection and hesitation as both evidence and refusal. 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. Here, the scar becomes a syntax; the bruise, a mark that asserts. Flesh does not forget — instead, it records. In 2019, I tore my ACL. During my surgery and recovery, I was bound by a kind of stillness that filled me with grief and anxiety. So I sat with my body and my camera, and began to look at myself — to understand the disconnected and abject relationship I shared with it. The feminist critic and philosopher Julia Kristeva articulates “abjection” as the inability to assimilate with the self, when the body feels foreign, alien, and threatens our sense of identity. When I first read these words, I realised how important it was for me, and for women to have a language that could help us define our sense of inclusion or exclusion. That realisation became a turning point. To photograph myself was not an act of self-display but a rehearsal in looking and learning how to witness without judgment, how to let the lens become a space of negotiation between shame and tenderness. What started as a quiet intervention with myself began to expand through a collaborative approach with over thirty women across India, into an intimate archive of the body. Here, shame and desire move together within the tender yet rebellious language of skin. In the selected works on display, these women rest and resist, embodying the reality of being. The irrefutable weight of the body makes its presence known — through tone, skin, marks, gestures, voices, scars, and bulges. In these encounters, women dissolve the distance between self and other. Their stories refuse classification, even as they expose the systems that shape them. Self-perception forms through kinship, labour, faith, appetite, friendships, and family histories. During our sessions, women spoke their secret inner lives into a shared space. Desire, fear, guilt, pleasure, friendship, and care — so much operates quietly beneath the surface. This work attempts to make that visible. Over the past five years, conversations have unfolded alongside the act of photographing, often within their domestic spaces. Across these portraits, women speak of their bodies as sites of negotiation and memory. Their stories expose how control is inscribed on skin, and how survival rewrites it. The process became an integral part of the exchange, where the women inhabited their own gestures, postures, and silences as a way of being with their bodies. I wanted to step away from a gaze that extracts, classifies, or surveils, and instead work within modes of collaboration. By foregrounding listening, intimacy, and choice, the work has become a shared effort to preserve the complexity of how women live with and against shame in India. The photographs presented here have also been selected collaboratively, through explicit consent. This slow process has been about finding ways that feel equitable to them, to me, and to the work, recognising that the ethics in such a practice are ongoing negotiations of trust and expectation. Each medium within spoiled fruit carries a distinct mode of encounter. The photographs work through sight — immediacy, confrontation, and presence. The photobook invokes touch, with the intent to evoke intimacy, narrative, and private reflection. The sound works through voice — breath, hesitation, and vulnerability that can’t be seen but can be felt. In collaboration with sound artist Moinak Bose, I wanted to assert voice as a carrier of memory — to build a stream of consciousness through a collective of voices and experiences, where a feeling of coherence is consistently fractured, much like how we relate to our own bodies. Together, these forms translate the same inquiry — how women inhabit their bodies across different sensory languages. spoiled fruit proposes a feminist archive that listens closely to the body’s language. Through this work, I preserve what has been dismissed as private or unworthy of record, insisting that the ordinary is political. Formally, the work operates through slowness, repetition, and consent — each image, page, and voice becomes an act of reclamation. In doing so, I reimagine the body as a living document that bruises, heals, and remembers on its own terms. Listening to women speak of desiring intimacy outside marriage, of longing to experience menstruation — all of it has revealed the contradictions that women live with every day. It is through these contradictions that I have begun to understand empathy not as softness, but as precision — a way of being present to another’s truth without attempting to fix or complete it. Through this work I have returned to my own body with a gentler gaze, not one of scrutiny, but of understanding. What began as a search for language has become a practice of witnessing; what began in solitude now rests in solidarity. spoiled fruit is not an end but a return, to a self that knows both the bruise and the bloom. - VASUDHAA NARAYANAN Sound Piece in collaboration with Moinak Bose (5:40 minutes) “Select works in this project were made possible through the support of the Generator Cooperative Art Production Fund, 2025-26.”