Padmini Chettur began her contemporary dance career in 1990 as a member of the troupe of Chandralekha—the radical Bharatanatyam modernist choreographer, whose own opus dealt with a rigorous deconstruction of the form. Over the past two decades, Chettur has defined her own choreographic idiom—minimalist, abstract and formal—stripping movement down to an essential, anatomical investigation, prioritising a sense of tension over emotion. Since her solo work Beautiful thing 2 (2011), and in later works—Wall dancing (2013), Varnam (2013) —her work has been seen in visual art spaces like steirischer herbst (Graz), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (Cochin), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), Jejak-Tabi (Jogja), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Archive (Berlin), hangar Bicocca (Milan) as her practice extended into film and durational works. Her most recent work ‘A slightly curving place’, premiered at Concrete (Dubai) and will be shown at EMPAC (New York) in November 2023.

Rohit Goel is Director/Professor of the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He is the editor of Future Perfect: Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary (Kaph 2023) and the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury 2019). Rohit has taught courses in critical theory, historiography, and politics at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. He received the Fulbright IIE and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowships to pursue years of Arabic language study in Syria and was awarded the Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon Fellowship for PhD dissertation research in primary sources in Lebanon. He completed his BA from Harvard College and, as Harvard University’s Paul Williams Fellow to Emmanuel College, was granted an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.