This Fire That Warms You by Tsohil Bhatia
Mentor: Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo)
September 5 – October 19, 2024
Wed–Sat, 12–6 pm

This Fire That Warms You is a solo exhibition by artist Tsohil Bhatia with mentorship from Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo). The exhibition 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.

This Fire That Warms You 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.

About the Artist
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 Blueprint.12 Gallery (India).

About the Mentor
Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (b. 1989, Dallas, TX), widely known by the moniker Puppies Puppies, expands ideas around the readymade by imbuing ubiquitous and everyday objects, signifiers, and actions with a personal and political charge. She has, for example, reconfigured antibacterial gel dispensers, toilet bowl liquid, and the color green, as well as the acts of sleeping, peeing, and taking a pill in installations and performances that challenge ableist frameworks of artistic and capitalist production. Many of Puppies Puppies’ exhibitions have also included actionable components: a GoFundMe campaign to support a friend’s transition fund, free HIV testing and counseling, and a working shower available for use by the public. Kuriki-Olivo asserts that life can be viewed as its own form of endurance practice, especially for those whose very survival is at stake, including trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people of color.

Exhibition Materials

Press Release
Click here to download a PDF version of the exhibition press release. For more info or press materials, email press@cueartfoundation.org.

Catalogue
This Fire That Warms You is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with texts by artist Tsohil Bhatia, exhibition mentor Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), and essayist Swagato Chakravorty (mentored by Alpesh Kantilal Patel as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program). The catalogue is available to read online, and a print version is available free of charge to gallery visitors.