Smita Sen doesn't perform at the gallery, which houses her new solo show, “Embodied,” every day, but the space is filled with her movement. The centerpiece of this exhibition is a raised circular platform covered with dried calendula flowers and decorated with a silver bowl placed in the center. The flowers are not evenly distributed across the surface—they contain peaks and valleys where the bare floor shows. Before the exhibition opened, Sen performed here. He calls the scores a “temporary record” of his choreography.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (MOCA) also exhibits three of Sen's dance films (and a video of his pre-opening performance), as well as his sculptures, paintings, prints and written works. “All of these pieces are a progression of my relationship with my body as it evolves and changes through injury, disease, grief and care,” Sen told the Observer. “As a dancer and someone who relies heavily on my body to perform—a great form of expression—visual art, performance practice and sculpture gave me an opportunity to reconnect with my body in a different way.”
“Embodied” is curated by MOCA North Miami curator Adeze Wilford, who began the role in early 2022 after serving as assistant curator at The Shed in New York City. He says it was important to him to promote the fusion of visual and performing arts at MOCA, and Sen's work, informed by his past as a ballet dancer, was a natural fit. In addition to the pre-opening performance, Sen will perform twice at MOCA—once during Miami Art Week in December and again in the spring of 2025 for a major public performance.
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“It will be the first time in a while that MOCA has partnered with a performance artist,” Wilford said. “One of the things I wanted to bring to the center when I arrived was to highlight how many intersections there are in the arts.”
Dance has long invited questions about preservation and archiving—how do you document something that only exists during performance? Sen's work addresses this, but not only through the lens of dance. “Composite” records movement and makes other intangibles—such as the emotions of grief and the physical experience of pain—audible.
This exhibition is largely informed by an important event in the artist's life: his father's terminal illness. This diagnosis put Sen in the role of caregiver, which told him his experience of grief when his father died. He was a geologist, which included Sen's interactions with places—just like in the film Grief Tectonics (2024), which was recorded in selected locations of the singer's father.
To him The Geology of Aspiration series, Sen's diary entries are paired with NASA satellite images, making visible the bleakness of the new world that comes with it. Viewers can read Sen's deepest thoughts in this work, a movement of courage and bravery that instills humanity and encourages collective healing.
“I'm trying to work on how we deal with our insides on the outside and bring them back on the outside,” said Sen.
This is a common thread throughout “Embodied,” which also draws on Sen's injuries and knowledge of his body. Body Painting (2015-2016) they form a series of six images showing the flour-covered floor on which Sen danced. Marks in flour, like those in calendula, keep Sen's experiments moving. And part The Geology of Aspiration they are four 3D printed images paired with them Emotions, Fossilizeda collection of medical-esque paintings of Sen's inner world, both emotional and somatic.
“All of these are works where I try to visualize the inner state of grief, but I also look at ghost pains and brain damage,” said Sen. “How do we control these changes in the body if it is difficult to understand them, suppress them or connect them to a certain physical disease?”
As we walk through the exhibition together, I tell Sen that, for me, the proverbial “North Star” of viewing art is that I feel something. He agrees, adding that artistic authenticity is his guiding force. Translating a person's inner world into something external that can truly probe another's inner world is a complex task, but one that Sen—and the “Incorporated of MOCA”—achieves.
“As time goes by, I give my warnings to more audiences,” concluded Sen. “Maybe that's in the paintings themselves, where I'll have little annotations that explain exactly how I visualize what's happening inside me or how I understand it or develop metaphors for emotions or pain. That was important—to give the audience an opportunity to understand their experience through certain metaphors and certain kinds of questioning.”
“Included” is on view at MOCA North Miami through April 6.
