Tracing marks both Nova Contemporary's tenth anniversary and its decade-long relationship with Kawita Vatanajyankur. Held in conjunction with the artist's major solo exhibition at Yuz Museum Shanghai, this presentation brings together recent and early video-performance works, spanning a celebrated practice that has long used the body to test systems of labour, power, and control.
The exhibition begins on the gallery's facade window facing Si Phraya Road. In The Carrying Pole (2015), Vatanajyankur suspends her body between two baskets of bananas, turning herself into a structure of balance and weight. The piece situates performance within the daily rhythms of urban labour, commerce, and display—an approach characteristic of the artist’s sustained engagement with everyday economies of work and value.
Inside, the first room gathers her most intimate works to date, using artificial intelligence to approach grief, family memory, and ritual. Both My Mother and (A)I (2025) and Echoes (2025) draw on a system trained through her late father’s writings. In the former, it guides her hand to paint in ash as her mother cradles her. The Buddhist death sutra is faintly chanted in the background, merging her mother’s recitation with a generated rendering of her father’s voice. In Echoes, the AI translates her father’s writings into Morse code, producing the rhythm that drives her body against a golden funerary bell. Between these two videos, a lightbox still from Flight (2025) reflects on the pull between holding onto memory and releasing it. Together, these works ask what it means to remember through a body increasingly entangled with machines.
The second room turns from memory to control, marking a formative moment in Vatanajyankur’s engagement with machine-guided systems. In The Machine Ghost in the Human Shell (2024), developed with Pat Pataranutaporn of MIT Media Lab, AI-powered electric muscle stimulation governs her movements as she struggles to retain agency. The work leaves human and machine locked together: the body is neither freed nor wholly overcome.
The final room returns to Vatanajyankur's earlier works, where she transforms herself into various objects and tools. Their vivid absurdity draws in the viewer, but repetition and strain quickly turn into discomfort, exposing the hidden physical costs of feminised labour. This tension is central to works such as The Scale (2015), The Egg Rack (2016), and Carrier II (2017), where the body is subjected to acts of calibration, support, and endurance. The Spinning Wheel (2018) extends this vocabulary into the histories of textile work, femininity, and mechanised repetition.
Across the exhibition, Vatanajyankur's own body becomes the site through which invisible forces take form: it registers the demands of labour, the pull of technology, and the fragile persistence of memory. Tracing is a study of endurance: the body carries what the world imposes upon it, and does not break.
