2026-02-19 | Razia Barsatie in a duo exhibition at SAC Art Amsterdam

Our fellow Razia Barsatie is participating in a duo exhibition with Rucha Kulkarni, 'CHOREOGRAPHIES OF COMPLIANCE: BETWEEN ALLOWANCE AND ACCEPTANCE' at South Asian Contemporary (SAC) Art Amsterdam.

Bringing together the practices of Razia Barsatie from Suriname and Rucha Kulkarni from India, the exhibition forms a charged spatial threshold, the “space in-between” where bodies carry histories that have travelled through time and distance, transformed, and settled into the present. The exhibition approaches femininity not as a fixed identity, but as a condition shaped through rules and allowances, permissions and acceptances, repetitions and restraints, silences and embodied negotiations.

Within this terrain, the body is encountered as both site and archive. Skin, breath, fabric, gesture, and rhythm register what culture inscribes through ritual, labour, belief, and displacement. Memory is not only recalled but physically held, embedded in cycles, domestic practices, and unspoken expectations carried across generations and geographies. These inscriptions do not dissolve; they accumulate, creating pressure, friction, and moments of pause.

As one moves through the exhibition, the works oscillate between interior and exterior states – both literal and metaphorical. Gendered experience unfolds across borders shaped by migration, colonial histories, and cultural inheritance. In India, femininity is tightly woven into daily rituals of the body and voice. In Suriname, these inherited structures carry strong ancestral traces that didn’t shift with distance and time but remained wedged in daily life. Across both contexts, the body remains permeable, allowing subconscious damage, ancestral memory, and emotional residue to surface gradually.

Domestic materials and ritualised actions anchor these negotiations. Gestures associated with care, protection, and belonging hover (too) close to expectation. Agency itself appears permeable – like the works which are translucent, layered and fluid – present but elusive. Stories surface indirectly, through bodies, materials, and collective processes, or remain folded beneath layers of silence. What can be shown, what can be thought, and what one dares to feel is continuously recalibrated and negotiated.

Rather than framing compliance as submission, the exhibition understands it as a lived choreography shaped by culture, displacement, gender, memory and time. Allowance becomes a conscious positioning within existing structures, while acceptance reveals itself as something learned, practised, and carried forward. The space between them is not empty, but resonant and charged – a threshold that holds tension and possibility, where resistance persists quietly through endurance, reworking, and the ongoing act of being.

Opening Night: Feb 20, 18:00 – 20:30: With an interactive performance by Rucha Kulkarni starting at 18:00.

You can see the exhibition until 7 April.

More information here