Mapping the unbounded sea

Delhi- and Berlin-based conceptual artist, photographer, poet and writer Maansi Jain specialises in interdisciplinary documentary and conceptual projects. Her recently concluded curatorial project, Between the Gulf of Blank and the Bermuda Triangle, was a conceptual art exhibition for oceanic thinking and ecological entanglement. The show’s title draws from the headline-making confusion around renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the rumoured phenomenon of the Bermuda Triangle, and the vast ocean that connects these — physically and psychologically.

“For many years, I have wanted to deepen my research into the ocean as a sculptural and ecological force upon the Anthropocene, our planet and the universe beyond Earth,” explains Maansi. In 2019, she curated an exhibition she geolocated “near Goa” via her sculpture, which now serves as the prologue to Between the Gulf of Blank and the Bermuda Triangle.

As she compiled oceanic research from lesser-known scholars and communities around the world, she sought to include works shaped by artists’ experiences of coastlines and oceans, especially in light of the ocean’s inherent borderlessness, despite anthropocentric illusions. Seven years later, an image that prodded her into action was Kaichen Li’s Sea Level Line, a poetic seaside scape of Italians in cowboy hats assembled for a group activity — an intriguingly dissonant mix of symbols and truths documented by a Chinese artist.

The show brings together 12 artists from India and abroad, including Madhu Venugopalan, Aastha Jain and Anubhav Saini. “The ocean is not divided by coastlines, but by gradients of temperature, salinity and density. These invisible boundaries structure movement, perception and life itself. Currents form not through borders, but through difference: warm against cold, light against weight. In this sense, the ocean operates as a sculptural field, where form emerges from relation rather than fixed geography,” elaborates Maansi.

To support the exhibition and ground viewers in knowledge gathered by scholars across the globe, Maansi created an open library. Her research was further shaped by Stefanie Hessler’s Prospecting the Ocean, which maps the current state of oceanic knowledge production across disciplines, notably through a non-linear lens. The library also features a playlist by autodidact musician DVDV, with music inspired by the ocean. Poetry, fiction and text as art also find space in the programme. “We wanted our audience to have a full-body experience akin to visiting the ocean,” she adds.

Since the age of 11, Maansi has been drawing, sewing and making patterns. “Fashion was my first love, and it has evolved into an element in the thick braid of my practice, which spans many media,” she says. In the 2010s, she moved to Berlin, absorbing what she describes as the EU geography’s metaphorical “groundwater” of European philosophy. Her practice engages photography as a material surface, transforming analogue images into sculptural forms that interrogate memory, displacement and spatial perception. Alongside this, she maintains a rigorous works-on-paper practice, exploring architectural grids, temporal mapping, abstraction and surrealist figurations as systems for organising lived experience.

Maansi draws inspiration from artists including Shobha Broota, Mona Hatoum, Alfredo Jaar, Annie Albers, Jenny Holzer, Alida Sun, Vera Molnar, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mithu Sen, Olafur Eliasson, Sarah Lucas and Amrit Singh Sandhu. “Art making, creativity, thinking conceptually and reifying the abstract into a form for a viewer is a practice that has allowed me to think through anything and across disciplines,” she says.

Her performances draw on feminist and South Asian modernist histories, reactivating figures such as Amrita Sher-Gil and Kamala Das through embodied painting and text. Her performance at Contemporary Fine Arts in December last year marked the culmination of years of research into Sher-Gil’s life, including field trips across India to access her works. In April, she will shoot a short film in which she plays Amrita Sher-Gil time-travelling, deepening the character while tracing her haunts in Paris, alongside a vignette of the enduring human struggle for self-actualisation, as an artist and as an individual.