Drawing Room: Why Prajakta Potnis’s art gives Palak Modi chills
In Prajakta Potnis’s photo series, a refrigerator transforms into an alien world, an icy chamber, or a sinister metaphor for everyday violence in our homes
Prajakta Potnis, like so many artists, uses the domestic space as the focal point of her photography, painting, sculpture and installations. Ordinary items such as kitchen appliances become vessels to depict economic, emotional and gendered violence. Potnis’s clever works highlight how innocuous objects are shaped by the rhythms of labour, caregiving and societal expectation.
Focusing on surfaces that crack, stain or show signs of strain, she makes visible the pressure that builds up in homes over years. She doesn’t dramatise these ideas. She just allows the tiny shifts in temperature, texture and material to speak for themselves.
A good example of this is Capsule 202 (2016), from her long-running photo series. The scene, a close-up of the inside of a freezer, seems almost otherworldly. Metallic ridges on the roof look down upon waves of ice, caught mid-movement. Ridged gates and hollow grooves add texture, contributing to the feeling of being boxed into an enclosed medical chamber. The image may appear calm and even clinical. But the longer you view it, the more alien it seems. This isn’t a freezer, anymore. Its pristine, white, icy surface shows subtle signs of disturbance, through scratches and discolouration.
Mumbai-based Potnis graduated from the JJ School of Art and has clearly thought long and hard about the role a kitchen plays in simplifying and glorifying the life of a homemaker. She’s considered how everyday food has helped define colonial prowess. I first saw her work while researching female Indian artists whose work involves the intimate and the political. Her selection of symbols piques my interest because domestic items are almost invisible to us once we are accustomed to their presence. By paying heed to them as sites of feminist critique, Potnis turns mundane items into metaphors that speak volumes about gendered, capitalist expectations and the frailty of the human body.
Where most artists use the human body explicitly to make a statement on gender politics, Potnis takes a detour and allows objects to stand in for bodies. This is a quieter but more insidious critique. By depicting mundane objects as sites of structural, systemic violence, she challenges the idea of the safe domestic environment itself.
With my background in psychology, I’m particularly interested in how environments condition us. This draws me to Potnis’ practice. Both of us focus on slow, often imperceptible processes that shape human behaviour in our work. While she uses domestic spaces and objects, I examine the nuanced ways in which the digital environment influences our sense of self, memory and attention. So while our contexts differ, we share an interest in depicting the long term effects of hidden systems, whether domestic or digital, and how they influence us over time.
New Delhi-based artist Palak Modi explores the interplay of death, decay and regeneration in her practice, to showcase the fragility and resilience of the human condition.
From HT Brunch, November 29, 2025
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