Smita Sen doesn’t perform in the gallery, which houses her new solo exhibition, “Embodied,” daily, but the space is infused with her movement. The show’s centerpiece is a circular raised platform covered with dried calendula flowers and adorned with a centrally placed silver bowl. The flowers are not evenly spread across the space—they contain peaks and valleys where the bare floor shows through. Before the exhibition opened, Sen performed here. She calls the marks an “ephemeral record” of her choreography.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA) is also showing three dance films by Sen (plus a video of her pre-opening performance), as well as her sculptures, drawings, prints and written works. “All these pieces are kind of the progression of my relationship to my body as it’s evolved and navigated injuries, illnesses, grief and caregiving,” Sen tells Observer. “As a dancer and someone who relied very heavily on my body for performances—a very virtuosic type of expression—the visual arts, performance practice and sculpture gave me a chance to reconnect with my body in another way.”
“Embodied” was organized by MOCA North Miami curator Adeze Wilford, who started in the role in early 2022 after working in an assistant curator position at The Shed in New York City. She says it was important for her to spotlight the integration of visual and performing arts at MOCA, and Sen’s work, informed by her past as a ballet dancer, was a natural fit. In addition to the pre-opening performance, Sen will perform twice more at MOCA—once during Miami Art Week in December and then again in the spring of 2025 for a larger-scale public program.
SEE ALSO: A London Exhibition Delves Deeper into Francis Bacon’s ‘Human Presence’
“This is going to be the first time in a while that MOCA is going to be engaging with an artist whose practice does engage with performance,” Wilford says. “One of the things that I wanted to bring to the institution upon my arrival was to highlight how many intersections exist within visual arts.”
Dance has long invited questions surrounding preservation and archiving—how do you document something that only exists for the duration of a performance? Sen’s work addresses this, but not only through a dance lens. “Embodied” records movement and makes other intangibles—like the emotions of grief and the physical experience of pain—palpable.
The exhibition is heavily informed by a significant event in the artist’s life: her father’s terminal illness. This diagnosis placed Sen in the role of caregiver, which informed her experience of grief when her father passed away. He was a geologist, which ties into Sen’s engagement with landscapes—like in the film Grief Tectonics (2024), which was filmed at a selection of the artist’s father’s former research sites.
In her Geology of Longing series, Sen’s diary entries are paired with NASA satellite images, making tangible the new world grief brings with it. Viewers can read Sen’s innermost thoughts in this work, a brave and bold move that centers humanity and promotes collective healing.
“I’m trying to really work through how we experience the external inside of ourselves and then mirror it back outward,” Sen says.
This is a common thread throughout “Embodied,” which also pulls in Sen’s own injuries and experience of her body. The Body Drawings (2015-2016) comprise a series of six photographs depicting a flour-covered floor on which Sen had danced. The marks in the flour, similar to those in the calendula, preserve Sen’s movement exploration. Also part of Geology of Longing are four 3D-printed sculptures paired with Feelings, Fossilized, a set of medical-esque drawings of Sen’s internal world, both emotional and somatic.
“These are all works where I’m trying to visualize the internal landscape of grief, but also look at ghost pains and psychosomatic injuries,” Sen says. “How do we manage these changes in the body when it’s hard to even understand them, pin them down or connect them to a distinct physical ailment?”
As we move through the exhibition together, I tell Sen that, for me, the proverbial “North Star” of art viewing is that I feel something. She agrees, adding that art-making truth is a guiding force for her. Translating one’s inner world into something external that can then authentically probe the inner world of another is a complex task, but one that Sen—and MOCA’s “Embodied”—accomplishes.
“As time passes, I give more and more prompts to my audiences,” Sen concludes. “Maybe that’s in the drawings themselves, where I’ll have little annotations outlining exactly how I visualize what’s going on inside me or how I’m understanding or developing metaphors for feelings or pain. That’s been essential—giving audiences a chance to understand their experiences through specific metaphors and specific types of inquiry.”
“Embodied” is on view at MOCA North Miami through April 6.
