Cooking by Instruction | Performance by Priyanka Choudhary

The artist follows instruction to cook up memories of a distant house in a faraway land at a crumbling bungalow in New Delhi. A bowl of grain, roasted and fried, releases fragrances and tastes of a childhood hiding behind doors, under beds and along the staircase. Lips moisten, eyes fill up, the long displaced remember. The cooking continues and a small part of Kashmir is recreated, as part of the Pahunch Ghar Project.

Priyanka Choudhary studied at Delhi College of Art, New Delhi. Her practice incorporates drawing, sculpture, installation, ceramic and performance. Her works revolve around questions regarding the normalcy of violence in everyday life. In 2016 she held her fourth solo exhibition The Second Throw at Gallery Maskara. She has exhibited in a number of group exhibitions which include A Place in Time curated by Helen Pheby at Nirox Sculpture Park, Johannesburg; Smell of War at Castle de Lovie, Poperinge, Belgium curated by Peter de Cupere in 2014. In 2013 Priyanka performed in five major conflict zones in four different continents. She was artist-in-residence at the prestigious Nirox Residency, Cradle of Humankind, Krugersdorp, South Africa. She was also awarded a month long residency at [R.A.T.] Residencias Artísticas por Intercambio, Mexico City culminating in a show at the same venue. 

About C 13
The event was a part of the programming of C 13, an exhibition which is a collaboration between FICA and artist Priyanka Choudhary. Between 2010-17, Priyanka used C 13 as a studio space and has now extended an invitation to other practitioners to rethink the possibilities of a studio space. The FICA Reading Room was also housed in the building for the period of three weeks. We invited Susanta Mandal to respond to this project of inhabiting C 13 - a home, a studio, an abandoned site that is being interpreted and experienced differently by each of the exhibiting artists and to come up with a structure for the Reading Room. He designed a self-contained unit, a mobile structure with all the architectural elements of a building. FICA Reading Room is a space for discussions and over the next three weeks we will hold many informal conversations in this room.