Art & Culture

From Fish Scales to Flesh: Inside Richi Bhatia’s Unflinching Solo Show

BYKhaoula Ghanem

September 10, 2025

When you first step into Richi Bhatia’s solo exhibition Antevasin at Gallery Isabelle, you’re being pulled into a threshold space, a borderland where the familiar and the unsettling collapse into each other. The Sanskrit title, meaning “one who sits at the border of two worlds,” feels less like a metaphor and more like a lived condition. For the artist, the border isn’t an abstract concept, but her medium. “This whole idea of working with fish scales and connecting it to the fish market began in 2012 when I was reflecting on a certain skin condition that I had called Lichen Planus Pigmentosus,” Bhatia explained to MILLE. “It left black spots on my skin and it was during that time I also discovered these fish scales from a river water fish called Rohu,” she adds. “I found them around my University campus, and that is the time I started working with them.”

That moment where the artist’s own body became entwined with the body of a fish sets the stage for everything that follows. The skin condition didn’t just leave marks on her, it transformed the way she thought about surfaces, textures, and the porousness between living and nonliving matter. From there, the Rohu’s iridescent scales became more than a material. They were a question, a provocation. What happens when the boundaries between flesh and food, body and market, are reimagined?

Born in 1990, Bhatia is an Indian multidisciplinary artist now based in the UAE. Her practice moves fluidly between drawing, performance, object-making, food intervention, and assemblage. What ties it all together is a commitment to embodied research: long, labor-intensive processes that treat the body as both subject and tool, probing memory, illness, environment, labor, and social systems. Her work has already been shown at spaces like Foundry, Gallery Isabelle, Alserkal Foundation, New York University Abu Dhabi, and Bikner House in New Delhi, and she has built a reputation as someone who challenges the conventions of both art-making and spectatorship.

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle

The 35-year-old’s works often begin in spaces where others might hesitate to linger. Markets, for instance, became her studios. “My initial concerns of using this material was very different. Until I started doing a series of ongoing performances called Hamlet Without the Prince,” she recalls. “It started in 2014 and it’s still going. It’s a series of acts and performances set in the fish markets across different cities in India, and now, in the UAE.” After maneuvering within these market spaces in India and then in UAE, she developed an interest in different interfaces of market as a space and meat as an object of inquiry.

The market is not simply backdrop for Bhatia. It’s her collaborator. The metallic clatter of knives, the slick touch of scaled flesh, the acrid smell of drying blood—these aren’t just sensory impressions; they’re layers of meaning. They make visible the entanglement of human and nonhuman lives in systems of labor, consumption, and survival. Her exhibition pieces, whether fish-scale shelters echoing migrant accommodations or ceramics resembling processed meats, are extensions of this research.

Smell, often dismissed as secondary, becomes central in her practice. To walk through Antevasin is to confront odors of fish, meat, sweat—the kinds of scents we instinctively recoil from but which quietly shape everyday economies. In this way, she disrupts the sterile neutrality often expected of gallery spaces. You’re not just looking at art; you’re inhaling it.

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle

“For the past five years these inquiries have magnified within the area of smell, within the area of different vocabularies that are floating in the market,” she says. “And also different nationalities the market is catering to. The Waterfront Market in Deira is my primary space of research and resource where I go for observation and making notes. I look at that space as my studio to further my research and these ideas and concerns that I want to portray through my work,” she muses.

But Antevasin isn’t only about sensory overwhelm. It’s also about the political charge embedded in something as ordinary as meat. “I’m also looking at meat as an assemblage of incorporating larger themes of gender, hierarchy, class, nationality, identity, state politics, and also religion,” Bhatia notes. “These are the areas that reflect on how we understand and consume meat. In a space like the UAE, which is largely Islamic, pork eating is banned because of religious concerns and in the same, back in India, beef is banned because of religious concerns. But, at the same time, India is in the top five exporters of beef.”

The contradiction she points to is striking: bans that exist side by side with global trade, taboos that dissolve when profit is involved. Through meat, Bhatia uncovers how belief systems, economies, and national identities overlap and conflict. It’s not just a matter of diet, but an index of power.

Her choice of Antevasin as a title reflects this liminal perspective. “Antevasin—a Sanskrit term; that means someone who sits at the border of two worlds seemed fitting as a title as I am looking at meat as an object of inquiry and as a transnational object,” she explains. “I was interested in looking at the various lenses through which this object was being read and shaped; which included religion, state politics, and mythology.”

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle

The border she refers to is not a fixed line. It’s a shifting zone where categories blur, and by placing herself—and by extension, her audience—at this border, Bhatia opens up space for discomfort. And in that discomfort, reflection.

Her multi-channel video piece, The Girl, the Donkey, and an Elixir for Life, crystallizes this logic. Filmed in Leh, India, it stages a collaboration with an abandoned donkey in a setting shaped by butter-making traditions historically sustained by women and animals. Here, the act of feeding churned butter to the donkey becomes a kind of offering, collapsing giver and receiver, laborer and beneficiary. The video is tender but unsentimental, asking: what happens when we acknowledge the nonhuman labor embedded in cultural practices?

If video works like this operate on an allegorical level, her installations insist on materiality. Fish scales glued onto canvases, ceramic sausages, animal hide stitched with hair and language—these are not objects that can be easily aestheticized. They demand that you sit with the fact that the very materials of life—meat, skin, blood, language—are also the materials of violence.

“I was also interested in the mapping of an animal into different forms leading it to become food,” she explains. “The vocabulary that was being generated through each step of mutation and abstraction of an animal body, the various languages that were floating in the market further highlighting who is consuming what.”

Language itself becomes part of her installations. Words like “ojhri”—the stomach lining of an animal—appear in Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Sindhi. They become markers of transnational exchange, but also reminders of how consumption is divided along lines of culture, class, and religion. It’s telling that she weaves these words into books with strands of her own hair, collapsing the intimate with the industrial, the body with the text.

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle

What’s compelling about Antevasin is how it doesn’t settle for a single entry point. You might begin with her personal story of illness, or with the fish markets of Deira, or with the broader politics of meat trade. But no matter where you start, you end up at the same threshold—the border where categories break down. As she puts it: “I have been interested in looking at the market as a fictional landscape that is at the effect of larger global and economic events and the hierarchies it creates.”

It’s a line that could also describe her own career so far. For Bhatia, art is about making objects, yes, but it’s also about crafting spaces where lived experience, politics, and material realities overlap. She’s an artist, but also a researcher, a performer, and at times, a provocateur. Antevasin doesn’t simply showcase her practice, it embodies it.

From Fish Scales to Flesh: Inside Richi Bhatia’s Unflinching Solo Show

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From Fish Scales to Flesh: Inside Richi Bhatia’s Unflinching Solo Show

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