As a fundamentally objectifying discourse, exoticism is fueled by a hunger for collecting. The desire for exotica reduced non-Western parts of the world to mere marketplaces in the colonial imagination. In such a flattened conception of much of the world, the line between object and person appears especially blurry. In Bhasha Chakrabarti’s bold Frick Rug series, the artist finds a source of power and agency by repurposing practices of objectification, transforming exotic objects in western collections into platforms of subversive embodiment.

Bhasha Chakrabarti’s powerful Frick Rug series taps into two major themes in her multifaceted practice: The material history of colonialism and the cultural significance of textiles. Bhasha’s work takes on two notable carpets in The Frick Collection in New York, which were elevated from decorative elements on the floor to elevated artworks on the wall through a curatorial shift in the early 2000s. Bhasha paints facsimiles of the rugs, which were commissioned during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan.

Upon the rugs, she paints herself nude as Mumtaz Mahal, Shah Jahan’s beloved wife who was famously entombed in the Taj Mahal. Chakrabarti depicts herself in the two forms for which Mumtaz was best known. One, gesturing to portraits where she’s depicted smelling a flower, and second, deceased, laid to rest in the world’s grandest mausoleum. Bhasha also recreates the fragments that were trimmed and distributed globally after the rugs were resized for wall display, hung on the wall as reminders of the arbitrary lines through which exotic objects are classified as decorative or significant.

Building on a larger practice of painting herself nude on rugs in colonial collections, Chakrabarti transforms her seemingly objectified body as a site of resistance, which, like the recreated rug, forces a reconsideration of power relations. Chakrabarti’s bold, unapologetic use of her own nude form challenges the viewer to think about their own relationship to the process of objectification, a dynamic that shapes our relationships to goods and bodies alike. Chakrabarti’s painterly technique in composing both the carpet and her figures centralizes the pleasure of beauty, but also raises questions of how the decorative and erotic are inextricably linked with structures of power.