Familiars Dance Among the Inverted
Annu Yadav, The Encounter (2024). Oil on canvas, 36 × 36 in. Courtesy of the artist and All Street Gallery.
All Street Gallery continues to prove that it is a space to watch. Annu Yadav’s solo show, Gold God Meat, curated by Bebe Uddin, is yet another reason why. Yadav’s work captivates with rich, earthy tones that move across both sculpture and painting. Uddin carefully considered the journey of the eye, placing smaller sculptures among the paintings. All leading to Yadav’s sculptural installation, Pour into me, anchoring the space. Touches of gold and the dazzle of fabric shimmer through symbols of eyes, abstracted animals, mirrored limbs, and wildflowers, blending the sacred with the grotesque. The corporeal becomes a shrine but also a carcass.
Yadav resists the visual logic of the male gaze, instead turning her figures inward: fragmented and unruly, embracing eroticism of her own incarnation. The ceremonial dismemberment present in her work recalls Elizabeth Grosz’s writing on the body as unstable and “a series of processes of perpetual re-creation.” Yadav’s practice embraces this instability, allowing desire and pain to coexist, echoing theorist Amber Jamilla Musser’s complication of Grosz’s ideas in her book, Sensational Flesh. While making specific references to Indian mythologies and feminized rituals, Yadav’s art speaks globally to how women’s identities are shaped by systems that attempt to underplay our power. Rejecting this dynamic, she foregrounds pleasure and self-authorship. As Musser writes, “masochism allows for the illusion of powerlessness while simultaneously coding for other forms of agency.” Yadav transforms spaces marked by objectification, violence, and constraint into scenes of agency, myth, and embodied power, all on her terms.
Annu Yadav, Self Replicating Organism (2025). Oil on canvas, 72 × 60 in. Courtesy of the artist and All Street Gallery.
Self Replicating Organism acts like a lucid dream, or the feeling of being naked at the bottom of the pool, questioning whether to stay there and drown or rise and become yourself again. Wildflowers and toes oozing with golden light become the portal between the fiery, earthen tones and the water that sets the stage for carnal rebirth. Underwater, the figure lifts her legs, the yoni becoming its own radiant being with unfathomable strength. Below her are ghostly figures—ancestors or perhaps coexisting kin—who support this cathartic ritual. Her determined gaze implies that she will resurface but she will not be who she was. She will emerge altered: a transmorphic body navigating femininity and disrupting phallocentric systems of meaning.
The wildflowers throughout Yadav’s work speak to the uncontrolled. When I interviewed Yadav, she spoke about polarity. “I’m drawn to tension. Opposites. Polarities. Good/bad, East/West, male/female, reverence/rebellion. I live in the middle,” she explained. Later, she went on to point out the hypocrisy in Greek and Christian mythology: the contradictory assertions that women are often labeled as excessive, not enough, or at fault. Yadav’s use of wildflowers, eyes, and other motifs rejects the projection of ornamental femininity, and the moralizing lessons of these mythologies are undone, transformed into a feral, self-directed reclamation.
Installation view of Annu Yadav: Gold God Meat, courtesy of the artist and All Street Gallery.
In Gold God Meat, Yadav’s abstracted animal forms are ambiguous and complicate her imagery. Whether it is the same creature shapeshifting or a collection of familiars protecting and guiding the women in Yadav’s work, these figures lay the groundwork for corporeal entanglement with decadence, sensation, and pain. Musser frames masochism not as a submission to harm, but as pain that speaks back, bodies that control their own undoing.
Yadav’s animal and human figures are inverted, suspended, and split, adorned, and sacred. They are not passive beings or background figures. They are agents of myth and metamorphosis. In Pour into me, the animal creature is suspended over an inverted bed with a reflective gold surface. Objects and a poem are laid beneath its legs. We wonder: is the creature walking along a storyline of mythology? Or perhaps it acts as a guide while the reflective gold invites the viewer to contend with their own relationship to the bed: possibly as a perpetrator, possibly a victim, both with the opportunity for reflection, accountability, reclamation, forgiveness, and change. For Yadav, the bed is a site of pain, love, hatred, calmness, comfort, and joy that moves with us across lifetimes. The bed is an architectural container for the body, and Yadav shifts its meaning into a non-functional altar, disturbing the domestic stereotypes of its condition.
Installation view of Annu Yadav: Gold God Meat, courtesy of the artist and All Street Gallery.
Yadav materializes what it feels like to live inside a body that has been politicized, gendered, spiritualized, and violated across time. Her paintings and sculptures do not resolve that tension but instead live in it. Her work resists the static idea of femininity and embraces movement, wildness, and the unknowable. As Yadav told me, “India gave me ritual and reverence. New York gave me permission and defiance.” It’s this duality that invites us to learn the stories of Yadav’s familiars and their counterparts.
Annu Yadav: Gold God Meat was on view at All Street Gallery from March 27 to April 6, 2025.
