Santa Fe Art Institute

Swati Piparsania

Swati Piparsania is a researcher and object maker. Her practice explores the complex relationship between the social body, the spatial body, and the surveilled body. To explore this relationship, she draws on theoretical frameworks of embodied pedagogy, relational aesthetics, post-fordism, and feminism. She utilizes elements of architectural interiors, sculpture, and dance to develop a series of designed propositions that critique and speculate a body’s interactions, movements and gestures.

She builds floors, mattresses, shoes, and pants that inscribe the dynamics for performance as well as its dysfunction. These objects elevate, bend, hide and restrict parts of the body, creating possibilities to unlearn conscious and subconscious disciplines of movement. In choreographing an unfamiliarity with one’s own body she expands our understanding of the body as a site of dissent, resistance, and intimacy.

Piparsania (b. Bhilai, India) currently teaches as an Assistant Professor of Industrial Design at Pratt Institute, NY. She received her MFA in 3D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and Diploma in Furniture and Spatial Design from Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology.