Performance art emerged through the experiments of early twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Dada, Futurism, and later Fluxus and Happenings, before becoming a distinct artistic practice in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of producing a painting, sculpture, or object, performance artists use actions, movement, time, space, and the body itself as their medium. The form has been closely connected to questions of identity, politics, gender, labour, memory, community, and social change, often inviting audiences to become active participants in the work. Over the decades, artists around the world have used performance to challenge conventions, create dialogue, share lived experiences, and explore how the body carries personal and collective histories. Today, performance art remains one of the most dynamic forms of contemporary artistic practice, with artists continually finding new ways to engage with the world around them. Here are three homegrown artists whose work demonstrates the many directions performance art can take, from questions of identity and gender to caste, community, and the lived experience of the body:

Aparna Ashok is a performance artist based in Chennai whose work frequently deals with the ways women are trained into obedience, respectability, and emotional labour. In 'What A Shame', she examined shame as a social tool that shapes women's behaviour and self-perception. In 'Civilised to Death', she drew from personal experiences of sexual violence and the expectations placed on women's bodies and conduct. Her performances often place her own body in situations of endurance, repetition, and exposure, inviting audiences to witness the emotional and physical weight of these experiences. Her work returns repeatedly to the everyday lessons, fears, silences, and forms of discipline that many women grow up with. Alongside her performance work, she has a background in visual arts and design, and her projects frequently bring together multiple disciplines to investigate the complexities of human experience and social expectations. 

You can follow Aparna here.

Sajan Mani's performances are deeply rooted in caste and labour histories. Coming from a family of rubber tappers in Kerala, he frequently uses his body to engage with the physical realities of work, exclusion, and social hierarchy. His long-running project 'The Black Dalit Body' explores how caste is inscribed onto bodies and public space. In works such as 'Burning Farm' and other performance interventions, he has crawled, carried heavy materials, occupied public spaces, and pushed his body through acts of endurance that draw attention to histories of oppression and resistance. Animals, forests, indigenous cosmologies, and Dalit political thought appear throughout his practice, creating connections between ecological questions and caste politics.

You can follow Sajan here.

Joshua Sailo is a multidisciplinary artist from Mizoram whose work moves across dance, music, and visual art. Trained as a dancer, he holds an MA in Dance from the Institute of the Arts Barcelona and Liverpool John Moores University. He works across contemporary dance, music, visual art, and performance, and his academic research engages with gender performativity and male exhibitionism. Looking through his public work, movement itself appears as the central material of his practice. Questions around masculinity, self-presentation, the performing body, and the relationship between physical and digital space recur across his performances, films, and collaborative projects.

You can follow Joshua here.

Here's more from Homegrown:

In 'DAKINI', Debjit Mahalanobis' Brings Double Bass Mastery To Bengali Performance Art

The Art Of Devotion: What I Learned At My First Ever Bengali Baul Performance

How Arpita Akhanda Stitches Inter-Generational Scars Through Performative Photography