spoiled fruit attends to the body as archive — a site where tenderness and defiance coexist in the tender, yet rebellious language of skin. Through photography, language and sound, I explore how women’s bodies in India are forged by caste, class, labour, and the quiet violence of expectation. In each image and voice, I gather gestures that resist the demand for polish, framing imperfection and hesitation as both evidence and refusal.

As a child, I asked my mother: Is blemished fruit spoiled? “Not spoiled,” she said in Tamizh, “just hurt.” That answer, both wound and balm, is woven through the work in its various forms. Here, the scar becomes a syntax; the bruise, a mark that asserts. Flesh does not forget, instead, it preserves.

Across these portraits, over thirty women from various cities in India speak of their bodies as sites of negotiation and memory. Their stories, simultaneously raw and luminous, expose how control is inscribed on skin, and how survival rewrites it. Each voice unsettles the expectation of beauty, of silence, and of endurance performed.

spoiled fruit proposes a feminist archive that listens closely to the body’s language. Through this body of work, I preserve what has been dismissed as private, minor, or unworthy of record, insisting that the ordinary is in fact, political. In doing so, I reimagine the body as a living document that bruises, heals, and remembers on its own terms.

The work also includes an artist book, and a sound piece.