'Corpus Nights', APRE Art House's new performance art series, brings together artists whose works unfold through live action and audience participation. Curated by Brazilian performance artist Paula Garcia, the inaugural edition featured three immersive performances that explored identity, violence, empathy and endurance, introducing Mumbai audiences to a form of contemporary art shaped as much by its participants as by the artists themselves.
For over two decades, Brazilian performance artist and curator Paula Garcia has built a practice around the body as a site for political, social and emotional inquiry. Her work has been presented across museums, biennales and performance festivals around the world, and she has also collaborated extensively with the Marina Abramović Institute on performance programmes and long-duration works. Earlier this month, Garcia brought that curatorial approach to Mumbai for the first edition of Corpus Nights, APRE Art House's new public platform for live art. Developed from the space's annual performance learning programme, the evening featured three short-duration performances that invited audiences into works unfolding in real time, setting the stage for an ambitious new series dedicated to performance art in India.
Held on July 12 at APRE Art House in Colaba, Corpus Nights (Short Duration) featured three performances by Aparna Ashok, Stina Aldén and Anuraj Rajendran. The evening opened with Aparna Ashok's 'Proof of Existence', a two-hour work in which she repeatedly photocopied her face. Through the simple act of feeding her face into a photocopier over and over again, Ashok examined bureaucracy, documentation, and the systems through which identity is recorded, reproduced and verified. The work unfolded slowly, allowing the repetitive gesture to accumulate meaning over time.
The evening's second performance, 'Flod', connected APRE Art House in Mumbai with Shift Gallery in Glasgow through a live cross-screening. Conceived by Swedish artist Stina Aldén, the work was performed simultaneously by Aldén in Glasgow and artist Akshay Jha in Mumbai. Audiences in both cities were invited to pour 35 cups of animal blood over the nude performer. Every decision to or refuse to became part of the work itself as a moral position. The performance brought together questions of empathy, consent, violence and industrial meat production, asking participants to consider their own relationship to another person's body and to the systems that make everyday acts of consumption possible. The live connection between the two cities meant every action echoed across both spaces, creating a shared performance unfolding simultaneously across continents.
The programme concluded with Anuraj Rajendran's two-hour endurance performance BRICK, in which he worked continuously with bricks through sustained physical labour. With its first edition, Corpus Nights has laid the foundation for what APRE Art House hopes will become an ongoing platform for performance art in India. Conceived as an open public programme, the series extends the spirit of the Corpus Performance Intensive, giving artists a space to present durational, live and time-based works centred on the body, presence and experimentation, without the constraints of conventional exhibition formats. Following the edition in July, the platform will continue with a Long Duration edition in October 2026, building a regular space for artists and audiences to engage with performance as a shared, evolving experience.
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