Roshni Bhatia

This Foundation Project, implemented by IFA under Explorations, will engage with Rafooghar (a community-based textile-led practice in New Delhi, where women gather) through sessions of stitching, drawing, assembling materials, visual notes, sound fragments, or a collection of prompts, to capture the subtle shifts in their shared space. Roshni Bhatia is the Coordinator for this project. 

Roshni Bhatia is an art psychotherapist, visual artist, and educator working across participatory, trauma-informed practices. She holds an MA in Art Therapy from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, and a BA in Creative Arts in Contemporary Arts Practices from Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology. Her practice spans feminist textile initiatives, public arts curation, and community health programmes, including arts-based care for dementia. Roshni is the recipient of the Singapore International Foundation Arts for Good Fellowship, and British Council TechArt CoLab Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in India, Singapore, and the Netherlands. Given her experience, Roshni Bhatia is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The project titled Noticing What Changes: An Exploration of Embodied Documentation is an artistic research project in collaboration with Rafooghar, a textile collective in New Delhi. Working with women in the collective, alongside a core team of community facilitators, including long-term members Fozia and Jyoti, the artistic project will create situations for responding to the difficulty of capturing subtle, relational, and non-verbal transformations. The exploration will investigate how shifts in mood, ease, and collective connection can be noticed and recorded through practice-based, care-oriented frameworks. Grounded in the understanding that not all lived experiences can be explicitly translated into language, the project will embrace ambiguity, hesitation, and silence as vital components of community-based art environments.

The artistic process will unfold through a series of gentle, non-disruptive, material-led experiments to test alternative methods of registering presence and memory, which will include post-session stitched or drawn responses, spatial mapping of participant movements, tracking material traces such as leftover threads and cloth fragments, and capturing atmospheric soundscapes of laughter and silence. The exploration will try to redistribute narrative agency back to the community by co-authoring bilingual visual notes, prompts, and stitched artworks with local participants. The artistic process will enquire how to engage with uncertainty, as an ongoing gesture of care. 

The outcome of the project will be community-based art practice, as a series of women’s gatherings of collective noticing of what resists documentation, through embodied, material and relational forms of making. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be the photographic and visual documentation of the artistic process.   

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to make sense of the indiscernible or giving form to collective notice, through acts of sisterly solidarities, which value the meanings of silence, and the ineffable. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm by convening an online gathering of artists coordinating Explorations projects. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees. 

This project is made possible with support from the Prasanta Niyogi Arts Legacy Initiative.