This article is part of Hyperallergic’s Pride Month series, featuring an interview with a different transgender or nonbinary emerging or mid-career artist every weekday throughout the month of June.
A pensive depth underlies the work of Tsohil Bhatia, a nonbinary artist based in New York City — part of the territory once known as Lenapehoking, homeland of the Lenape, Bhatia notes. This attention to ancestral histories is manifest in their performances and objects, which often illuminate the unseen knowledge and processes behind domestic and food-based labor. The artist, who also describes themselves as a “homemaker,” is working on a series of dried and decayed fruits and vegetables, among other artworks that allow time to act on an object or idea — transforming it beyond recognition, or perhaps revealing its true self. (Bhatia has an apple from last September, encased in glass, in their studio; “I just let it do its thing,” they say of the rot and organisms that have sprouted in the fruit.) In the interview below, Bhatia delves into concepts of endurance, loss, and turning the kitchen into an art studio.
Hyperallergic: What is the current focus of your artistic practice?
Tsohil Bhatia: I come from a background in performance art and photography and my work is sometimes a representation of my present being and other times a study; a forensic viewing of routines, my surroundings, and my everyday.
I make work anticipating my mother’s death, like an anxious preparation for that moment. So the process of making is a methodology for waiting and builds time into my practice. My performance practice is also a healing practice that employs exposure therapy, endurance, and meditation. In “The Length of Daylight – III” (2020), I counted my breath and drew a mark for each inhale from sunrise to sunset. The performance, which takes the form of 14 drawings, was a mourning ritual performed after my grandmother’s passing.
Unlike a very personal work like that, in Fruits of Domestic Labor (2022–ongoing), I have been drying different fruits, vegetables, and plant matter to preserve them forever. The drying process embraces decaying and rotting. The organic matter over the period of its decay becomes many things; it shrivels and shrinks, it plays host to other life, and sometimes it becomes nothing at all. This work is an archive of dried, decayed, and dead objects.
Over the last few years, homemaking and care work has become such an important part of my practice. I co-founded Red Flower Collective, a food research and communal eating collective that hosts meals in New York City. The project intends to make visible the labor of homemaking and the kitchen and perform a labor of care that sits outside the cultural hegemony of capitalism. The research has led to the kitchen expanding to become a laboratory and a studio. I’m often thinking about our eating practices, ancestral knowledge, and the processes of the kitchen, and my work is currently guided by the study of performative and sculptural vignettes that occur in a domestic setting.
H: In what ways — if any — does your gender identity play a role in your experience as an artist?
TB: My early work contended with my body and its limits and aspirations and was very much informed by my relationship with it. I made a few hundred self-portraits that are formative to how I think. I believe today, my body and its gender are more of a footnote to my practice. While I make most of my work about my experiences as a nonbinary queer artist, I don’t assume an inherent knowledge that is revealed by that categorization. I believe my gender identity plays out in the work in some mysterious ways that I can’t completely identify.
H: Which artists inspire your work today? What are your other sources of inspiration?
TB: I’m very inspired by the work that my friends are making, and they all inspire me in different ways. My mind is a conglomerate of some of their and my own personal history. I learn so much from the women in my family and it is extremely important to me to recognize their labor that has been made invisible for decades. I have been very inspired by the work of Keioui Keijaun Thomas, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Rachel Youn, Tourmaline, Carlos Motta, Fadescha, Katie Hubbard, Gordon Hall, Wilfredo Prieto, and Alexandre Estrela, to name a few.
H: What are your hopes for the LGBTQIA+ community at the current moment?
TB: To unapologetically ask for more for ourselves and our kin. To remember our ancestors, to remember the ones we’ve lost, to nurture our youth, to protect the ones threatened by families, governments, and lovers. To make space and to build a culture that encourages care.
