“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir in her landmark treatise, The Second Sex. Beauvoir rejected the entrenched mythologies that encase womanhood in passive eternities, replacing them with a fluid vision of the body as both circumstance and choice. Liton Kar’s latest exhibition, “She, The Universe: The Infinity Within Her,” held at Alliance Française de Dhaka from July 18 to July 26, 2025, dialogues profoundly with Beauvoir’s potent proposition, staging womanhood as an unquiet symphony of moments and possibilities.
Kar’s painted women evade static definition; they move within their frames, shimmering between states of existence: vapour, blood, memory and rebellion. The figures do not pose for the viewer’s pleasure. Instead, they manifest forms of discomfort and daring, gazing back from canvases as if aware of their paradoxical permanence and fragility. Kar’s brush conjures women who neither submit nor strictly rebel but who appear perpetually on the threshold of becoming.
The curatorial choices were made with exquisite subtlety, emphasizing quietude and reflection over heavy-handed explanations. The walls were sparse and gently lit, providing the paintings enough breathing space to establish their emotional gravity. Viewers drifted seamlessly from one image to another, navigating emotional landscapes marked by absence, silence, joy, and distress. The exhibition allowed a spectator to experience womanhood not as a fixed category but as shifting emotional weather, subtly asserting that understanding is as much about silence as it is about revelation.
A central triptych served as a visual anchor for the exhibit, depicting three phases or perhaps three states of feminine experience. The first panel presented a ghostly woman, nearly immaterial, rising like smoke towards a hidden moon, suggesting ancestral memory or spiritual transition. The central figure stood wrapped in red, eyes veiled, her posture evoking both birth and death, womb and tomb, a potent symbol of generational continuity and trauma. The third panel portrayed a woman seated at an unsettling domestic scene, her sari merging into the fabric of her surroundings. The emptiness around her whispered a narrative of estrangement, loss and alienation.
In the canvas explicitly devoted to Mahsa Amini, Kar employed stark political imagery with uncompromising directness. The blindfold of Iran’s national flag across her face functioned not merely as symbol but as accusation and lament. Her anonymity amplified the universal resonance of her fate, turning her figure into a clarion call against patriarchal oppression. Her stance amid blurred companions declared solidarity not in shared oppression but in shared defiance, forming a visual enactment of the revolutionary chant, “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
Another painting evoked sensuous allegory, portraying a woman standing serenely in a watermelon-shaped boat. The vibrant reds and greens were both jubilant and subversive, suggesting fertility, migration and resilience, articulating femininity as inherently resistant, exuberantly defiant.
Three reclining figures, softly rendered in blues and purples, explored different textures of repose, oscillating ambiguously between rest, erotic languor and death. These images captured the vulnerability Beauvoir identified as central to the embodied situation of women, showing rest not merely as surrender but as resilience. These were women momentarily withdrawn from the relentless demands of visibility and social surveillance.
A ferocious canvas titled “The Red Storm” diverged markedly, depicting equine figures tearing through turbulent scarlet clouds. Despite the absence of an explicit feminine figure, the chaotic violence seemed explicitly gendered, evoking wartime violence against women’s bodies, rendered as elemental fury.
Kar’s paintings are undeniably beautiful, and herein lies a critical complexity. Does the sheer aesthetic appeal of these canvases temper the political urgency they represent? Beauvoir’s warning echoes clearly in this tension. In aestheticizing trauma and resistance, is Kar risking the dilution of political rage into romanticized contemplation? The very act of beautification can obscure the harsher realities these canvases gesture toward, potentially soothing rather than provoking.
The exhibition’s title, “She, The Universe,” further invites scrutiny. Does this universalizing impulse risk slipping back into essentialist myth-making, precisely what Beauvoir cautioned against? Does the abstraction of womanhood into cosmic allegory deny the embodied specificity of real women, thereby deferring genuine political change in favour of eternal symbolism?
Yet the paintings themselves resist simplistic accusations. Each canvas demands that the viewer consider the precise conditions of women’s situated existence. The mythic qualities do not entirely obscure but rather amplify women’s agency and resilience. Kar’s images are not merely celebrations of femininity; they are declarations of ongoing struggle. They propose a body politic that is sensual yet severe, poetic yet precise in its critical purpose.
Ultimately, Kar’s exhibition leaves us in productive uncertainty. Beauvoir’s vision of the body as a situation finds vivid expression here, as Kar refrains from giving easy answers. Does his painterly lyricism serve to politicize aesthetics, turning beauty itself into a site of defiance? Or does the allure of these images aestheticize and thus soften the very realities they intend to critique? The romantic rendering of female forms invites discomfort precisely because it tempts the viewer into complacency even as it reminds us of enduring struggles.
We depart from “She, The Universe” not with easy closure, but haunted by essential questions. If Beauvoir saw the body as both limitation and potentiality, Kar’s women suggest that womanhood remains a contested territory, a living canvas upon which freedom is sketched anew, continually deferred yet perpetually sought. In painting these women as universes, Kar reminds us that infinity is not comfort; it is constant negotiation with limitation, an endless conversation between what is and what could yet become.