"This body is not mine, nor is the world" by Krishna Reddy & Nasreddine Bennacer

This Body is Not Mine, Nor is the World brings together the intersecting yet distinct artistic practices of Krishna Reddy (1925–2018) and Nasreddine Bennacer (b. 1967), as part of Échos à Paris Noir, curated by Alicia Knock at the Centre Pompidou.

Born in Chirayapalli, Andhra Pradesh, Reddy received his early education at Visva-Bharati University, where he was deeply influenced by Nandalal Bose and the intellectual legacy of Rabindranath Tagore. His path took him from London, where he studied sculpture under Henry Moore, to Paris, where he became immersed in the avant-garde milieu. There, at Atelier 17—an international printmaking studio led by Stanley William Hayter—Reddy developed the viscosity printing technique alongside fellow Indian artist Kaiko Moti. This innovation bridged sculpture and printmaking, allowing for multilayered images that captured both texture and psychological depth.

A committed anti-colonial thinker, Reddy was deeply engaged in the Indian independence movement and later lent his support to the Algerian liberation struggle, which led to several mistaken arrests by French police. His works—such as Demonstrators (1968), made in the context of the May ’68 protests—channel political solidarity through collective form, merging artistic experimentation with social engagement.

Nasreddine Bennacer, a Franco-Algerian artist born in Guelma and raised in Algiers, lives and works in Paris. His work explores identity, cultural memory, and post-colonial critique through a wide range of media, including sculpture, painting on plexiglas, installation, and drawing. Earlier works often addressed power structures with both irony and emotional weight. In recent years, Bennacer has turned to a more minimal and poetic visual language, particularly through his use of Japanese paper, where abstraction and figuration blur. These drawings reflect an embrace of fragility, of chance, and of layered temporalities, allowing memory and traces to surface beyond conscious control.

Bennacer arrived in France during the Algerian Civil War, an experience that shaped his awareness of visibility, displacement, and marginalization. His art resists simplistic narratives of origin, instead articulating a complex, fragmented relation to identity and territory.

The two artists met in the final years of Reddy’s life, leading to a collaborative work titled Paper Trampoline. Inspired by Reddy’s late series of clown drawings, Bennacer reinterpreted these figures through the lens of spectacle and control. The circus becomes, in their shared vision, a site of imposed identity—a metaphor for the ways in which bodies are surveilled, performed, and marked as “other.” Here, Bennacer introduces questions of race, migration, and belonging, interweaving his own lived experiences with Reddy’s long-standing interest in humanist abstraction.

Their dialogue, forged across generations and geographies, explores the thresholds between form and memory, image and resistance. If Reddy’s luminous surfaces capture the resonance of collective uprising, Bennacer’s pared-down gestures trace the more intimate violence of erasure and exile. Together, their works propose a visual language attuned to the complexities of diasporic experience, post-colonial critique, and the poetic potential of materials.

Azad Asifovich & Hannah Kreile for Private Institution