What if learning and unlearning could feel like a spell? Like letting go? Like dancing through fire?

Disco Inferno takes its title from a popular anthem of ecstatic release, a scene of a fire in a top-floor ballroom and a loose translation. I learn through suffering. It’s a phrase that flickers between pop spectacle and something slower, more interior. On one level, it conjures the dancefloor - a site of freedom, rhythm, and communal transcendence. On another, it speaks to the transformative textures of pain, repetition, and ritual. This exhibition moves between these registers, bringing together three artists - Nithya Iyer, Asha Maria Madge, and Leo Bagus Purnomo - whose practices engage in layered, often embodied ways, with memory, identity, ancestry.

The idea of movement - across bodies, borders, and belief systems - threads through the exhibition. Nithya’s two-channel video work Sītā anchors the show with a poetic excavation of diasporic inheritance and feminine visibility. Drawing from the Hindu epic Ramayana, Nithya stages the performative act of digging and lying in her own grave - a gesture both symbolic and corporeal. The grave here becomes not only a site of mourning, but a threshold; a furrow that marks and un-marks territory, identity, and time. Her merging of mythic and personal lineages suggests an alternate passage for South Indian diasporic women. One in which fragmentation can also be a site of reclamation.

In dialogue with this, Asha’s paintings offer a sensorial counterpoint. Her layered and gestural works meditate on the slippages between memory and place, abstraction and the body. Asha paints from a perspective shaped by geographic and cultural transience, allowing multiple temporalities, textures, and registers to coexist. Her work resists linearity, embracing instead a kind of painterly improvisation that echoes the visual rhythms of dream, movement, and sensual recall. What emerges is a painted archive of feeling and fugitive memory.

Leo’s installation practice expands these ideas into the atmospheric and the mystical. His fabric-based works, accompanied by the lingering scent of jasmine, conjure thresholds into unseen worlds. Drawing from Javanese mysticism, conceptual art, and critical theory, Leo’s work probes the porousness of identity. Refusing static representation in favour of multiplicity and the ineffable. His approach reflects an ongoing interest in epistemic crossings: where inherited knowledge systems meet posthuman and spiritual frameworks; to disrupt and reimagine what it means to belong.

These artists resist the instrumentalisation of identity demanded by institutional diversity frameworks. Their works illustrate complex, embodied practices that ask us to sit with the messier, more human parts of who we are. Nithya, Asha, and Leo offer more than representation; they’re offering transformation! Suggesting how art might generate new methods of knowing, and new forms of movement, both within and beyond the self.

Image | Still from Sīta (2023), a two-channel projection installation (9′14″) by Nithya Iyer, created during a residency at AADK, with shooting and editorial support from Vlad Mizikov.