An evening of readings by artists, writers and poets responding to the themes and works within T. Venkanna’s current exhibition, Sculpture Garden.
Writer Eva Gold, poets Rashed Aqrabawi, Bhanu Kapil and Mantra Mukim and artist, researcher and writer Michiko Oki, will draw inspiration from the themes explored in Venkanna’s exhibition, including ideas surrounding sex, desire, power, violence and transgression.
Comprising a series of new egg tempera paintings on board, Sculpture Garden is Venkanna’s first institutional solo exhibition. Together, the paintings create a complex portrait of national identity and the persistence of desire, as Venkanna documents the body as both a site of liberation and control.
Lead Programme Supporter: Blanca & Sunil Hirani Charitable Trust. Programme Supporter: The Burger Collection with additional support from the T. Venkanna Exhibition Circle, The Studio Voltaire Council and Art Fund's John Ruffer Curatorial Grant.
T. Venkanna (b.1980) Gajwel, India; lives and works in Hyderabad, India. Selected solo and group exhibitions include: The Human Theatre, Gallery Maskara, Mumbai (2025); Politically Charged, Aicon, New York (2024); Asia Now, Modesti Perdriolle Gallery, Brussels (2023); The Art of India, Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Iowa (2021); Looking for Peace, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai (2017); and Trajectories: 19th – 21st Century Printmaking from India and Pakistan, Sharjah Art Museum (2014).
Dr Michiko Oki is a London-based cultural researcher, writer and lecturer. Her work focuses on the aesthetic and hedonistic power of dark imagination, particularly in the form of allegory and fiction. She also explores polytheistic perception as a means of transgression that challenges the violence of identity thinking and the normalisation unique to monotheistic belief systems.
Eva Gold works across sculpture, installation, writing and drawing to explore questions surrounding desire, agency and consent. Alongside a materially driven sculptural practice, she uses narrative writing to examine the complex, nuanced and often contradictory nature of desire, and the ways that is produced by, and against, the power structures which contain it.
Rashed Aqrabawi is a writer born in Amman, Jordan. His work has appeared in BOMB, The Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. He is the winner of the 2024 BOMB Poetry Prize and the author of the pamphlet Christ, Mountain Road (Blown Rose, 2026). He lives in London.
Mantra Mukim is a poet and essayist from Raipur, India, currently based in Oxford. His debut collection, Glitchwork (the87press), was published in April 2026.
Bhanu Kapil is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is the author of several full-length collections, including How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press) and Incubation: a space for monsters (Prototype). Bhanu is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College and the recipient of the TS Eliot Prize, a Windham-Campbell Prize, the 16th International Poetry and People Prize, a Cholmondeley Award and a Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship. Since 2020, she has collaborated with Blue Pieta, a choreographer, dramaturg and performer, with whom she has written a new work, Autobiography of a Performance.
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T. Venkanna Tota (detail), 2026. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Maskara
