"This Fire That Warms You" by Tsohil Bhatia

“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.