Avni Sethi is an interdisciplinary practitioner with her primary concerns lying between cultures of violence, memory, space and the body. She conceptualised and designed, the Conflictorium, a Museum of Conflict (www.conflictorium.org) in Ahmedabad and Raipur city and Mehnat Manzil (www.mehnatmanzil.org), a Museum of work situated in Ahmedabad, Gujarat in 2013, 2022 and 2019 respectively. She has been writing and speaking about the potential of small museums as a holding space for social justice processes and the necessity of building care-based ecosystems.
She works with the body as a site of remembering and resistance. Her practice unfolds through movement, performance, and the making of spaces that hold difficult histories. Trained in multiple dance idioms, she draws from syncretic faith traditions and everyday gestures to ask how the body carries memory, its ruptures and silences. She has been continually interested in exploring the relationship between intimate audiences and the performing body. She is currently nurturing ‘Ordo Performance Collaboratory’, a studio space that focuses on performance-based experimentations.
She currently lives and works in Ahmedabad, India.