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Drawing on methodological origins of working with and from space, kokki grounds itself in a site-specific response to the building that now houses The Ryder Projects – a former ham-drying factory in Madrid’s Tribunal district. In Dia’s interpretation, the site epitomises how modernity conjoins technology and the organisation of flesh. Reimagining the hanging lines of cured hams, the spatial arrangement reflects the mechanised cadence of the assembly line, where flesh is segmented and reorganised by capital.

kokki, meaning hook or clasp in Tamil, is a new video work developed for the occasion of this exhibition, which extends the ideas introduced in the preceding studies alongside Dia’s recent research at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. The work engages Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human, which argues that Blackness and other racialised forms of being were not simply excluded from the category of the “human” but violently included as plasticity. This two-channel video installation uses metal hardware to construct an entity-like form, drawing from the pierced and suspended body in kavadi attam, a ritual of endurance and devotion practiced by Tamil Hindu communities. The work engages with the relationship between bodily sacrifice, industrial machinery, and systems of production. It draws a line between the material culture of ritual and the infrastructures of mechanisation, particularly those found in slaughterhouses and factory lines.

The video moves through a speculative sci-fi landscape, where the material quality of engine parts and carcasses converge. This speculative terrain operates at the intersection of the interior and the industrial, where the sensorial registers of labour and extraction circulate as pervasive conditions. Archival footage of kavadi attam, sourced from online platforms, appears as a practice extended into another dimension, its forms stretched and recontextualised within a speculative, machinic landscape. The work draws on the symbolic and material dimensions of bodily endurance, asking how forms of devotion intersect with systems that render the body both expendable and instrumental. Through these layers, the installation reflects on the violence of the category of the human itself, its exclusions, its entanglement with racialising and animalising logics, and its continual production through the management of flesh.

These synthetic scenes distort and reconfigure the archive, collapsing distinctions between human and animal, industry and ritual, machine and body. kokki continues Dia’s ongoing exploration of how conceptual and visual tools can be developed to read the ontological contours of indentured and forced labour — to understand the plantation as a monocropped simulation mapped onto the terrain of the body, flesh, and disciplined subject.

Material Study: After Form I–III extends an ongoing investigation into stress mapping, somatic endurance, and the shifting dynamics of pressure and release. Through a repetitive and durational process, each gesture is pressed inwards, becoming a register of bodily cadence and exertion. The recurring motif of the hook threads through these works as a point of tension, drawing connections between acts of suspension and the broader histories of manufacture, labour, and mechanisation. Aluminium’s conductive and reflective qualities complicate how the surface is seen and felt, and how light moves across its perforations, revealing and obscuring traces of touch.

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Sound Design: Ege Şahin
Title Design: Darius Ou

Supported by National Arts Council, Singapore