Maithili Rajput
What if discomfort is where power lives?
Through labor-intensive processes and intimate gestures, I explore endurance, resistance, and boundaries. Using sculpture, performance, video, and installation, I reinterpret everyday objects and bodies, revealing the inherent dangers within the mundane. Materials like steel, wood, and personal objects tied to my upbringing become vessels for these investigations.
Often, I conceal my body within these materials or disguise it in the environment, implicating the viewer in the tension between fragility and strength. By positioning my body in confined spaces, I force an encounter with vulnerability; asking how boundaries shape our connection to one another, to objects, and to the spaces we occupy.
Through cryptic and alluring arrangements, I challenge perceptions of belonging, intimacy, and displacement. These works create spaces where the familiar and unsettling coexist, urging viewers to confront the discomfort of the unknown. Through my practice, I highlight the stakes of what it means to be a woman, a target, and a vulnerable body in a world where the right to exist in space is always contested.
Not suffering, but the weight of struggle, the stretch of time, and the quiet resistance of limits. Encased in steel boxes or confined within structures barely larger than my body, I examine the boundaries of endurance. These works engage with cultural, gender, and social norms, inviting reflection on the forces that shape movement and the limitations we navigate. By confronting these constraints, the viewer becomes part of the experience, engaged in the delicate balance between agency and restriction. If discomfort is where power lives, then endurance is neither victory nor loss, but simply existence.
431002, 2024.
Two-channel video performance installation with rebar, coconut husk, lime, chili pepper, and human body, 16 × 18 × 31 in.
The Scarf, 2025.
Live performance and installation with wood, steel, turmeric, clay, ghee, spinning motor, extension cord, screws, saw dust, aluminum, and human body, 77 × 17 × 17 in.
He[a]re, 2024.
Site-specific live performance installation with steel, wood, screws, hinges, latches, galvanized steel pipes, fittings, cinder block, and human body, 32 × 25 × 12 in.
Dak ID: 404, 2024.
Two-channel video performance installation with shipping box, shipping label, wood, plywood, screws, coconut sheets, monitors, media player, photograph, and human body, 96 × 96 × 24 in.