I Seem To Be A Verb presents a new chapter in Rithika Pandey’s evolving cosmology.
Bringing together a body of works that, in their sincere playfulness and imaginative rigour,
explore our emerging emotional landscapes in the age of contamination. The exhibition
orbits around a crucial inquiry: how do you choose to soften when the world is falling apart?
To soften may just be the strategy we need to make sense of the contradictions we presently
face. To seem to be a verb at this moment is to accept that we are weathered by this world
of ours.
The title of this show borrows from the American polymath Buckminster Fuller’s eponymous
book, in which he reflects on the human as dynamic patterns of energy in constant
exchange with our environment. In Rithika’s new works, this proposition becomes visceral.
Her characters do not exist as sealed bodies, but come undone within the pressures of
change. Engaging in ritual, encountering other-than-human life-worlds, they navigate
physical and spiritual thresholds. Bodies and borders leak in multiple, indeterminate
directions. To “be a verb” here is to become porous, vulnerable to contamination and be
reshaped endlessly in the process.

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