Vessel | cyclical transmission of grief and joy (solo)

Siva’s Delhi debut exhibition, பாத்திரம் / Vessel, an IAF Parallel at Pulp Society engages with Tamil Dalit Futurism—a framework informed by Afrofuturist discourse—to interrogate the entanglements of science fiction, technology, sociology, mythology, and speculative futures. Siva envisions radical counter-futures that challenge the capitalist temporality of progress-as-horizon, reframing futurity not as a linear projection but as an immanent quality embedded within the present. Informed by Octavia E. Butler’s conceptualization of hierarchical structures as intrinsic to humanity’s systemic failures—where power asymmetries breed intolerance, violence, and social fragmentation—Siva’s work foregrounds hybridity, mutation, and queerness as sites of resistance and transformation. Butler’s narratives articulate an emergent model of community—coalitions of mixed, evolving entities shaped by non-normative genealogies. Siva extends this logic to a South Asian context, constructing speculative mythologies rooted in Dalit and Tamil epistemologies while reconfiguring existing frameworks of identity, power, and futurity. Siva’s hybrid figures function as mythopoeic interventions, disrupting hegemonic narratives of purity and normativity. The rooster-human chimera invokes Bahuchara Mata, a deity venerated by trans communities in India, gesturing toward fluid and non-binary embodiments. The serpent-human entity references the Arabic myth of Shamaran, a symbolic figure reclaimed in contemporary Turkey and the Middle East as an icon of LGBTQ+ rights. The tiger-woman hybrid articulates feminine agency and subaltern strength, subverting anthropocentric and patriarchal taxonomies. These chimeric forms resist essentialism, instead proposing multiplicity, transmutation, and interstitial existence as modalities of survival and self-definition. The title Vessel is emblematic of the Dalit body as a site of historical inscription—a container of intergenerational memory, trauma, expectation, and affective labor. This corporeal archive holds and transmits histories of marginalization, resilience, and defiance, negotiating the dialectic of containment and release. The vessel becomes both repository and conduit, embodying the cyclical transmission of grief and joy across temporal and spatial thresholds. In foregrounding the Dalit body as a living vessel, Siva dismantles structures of casteist erasure, insisting on a futurity that is simultaneously rooted in ancestral knowledge and oriented toward radical reimaginings of existence.