Pragati Gunasekar | Artist - A Tax Paid in Flesh

Breast Tax | Installation View 2

MFA Thesis Finals |May 2025

📍 New York Academy of Art

Spatial Works & Installations

Golden Wounds transforms coconut coir, turmeric, rice, clay forms, banana leaves, and coconut shells into an environment where labor, sustenance, and rupture intersect. Fresh green banana leaves press against withered ones, while clay breasts hang at uneven heights—some holding or oozing coir—evoking the women whose labor fueled rope-making yet remained unseen.

The coconut coir ropes, once a tool of survival, becomes a binding force that restricts growth, recalling a time when even rice—the staple of life—was extracted as tax. Together, these materials form a tender yet charged landscape where histories of burden, dignity, and survival surface through fracture and repair.

A Tax Paid in Flesh, June 2025; A concise video essay on Kerala’s nineteenth-century breast tax and Nangeli’s act of refusal. Through close-ups of clay, coconut coir, ropes, and turmeric, the work traces fragments of erased records and gestures of resistance. A calm voiceover weaves history with material process. Open-captioned for accessibility.

Golden Wounds (installation view), 2025

Golden Wounds (close up), 2025

Rice as Tax, Tear-drop Shaped breasts

Golden Wounds (close up), 2025

Tear-drop Shaped Clay Breast Breasts

Tear-drop Shaped Clay Breasts Suspended

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