Prajakta Potnis

he woke up with seeds in his lungs, 6

he woke up with seeds in his lungs by Prajakta Potnis is a set of x-ray films presented through backlit light boxes of found objects constructed to evoke the body or organs that turns the host into a foreign element. The title of the work is inspired by a story the artist came across during her research, according to which a man had swallowed seeds that started to grow inside his organs. In the work, interior scapes of the body appear as radioactive rays pass through various materials. 

In 2019, Potnis’s 75 year old uncle, who worked at a detergent factory four decades earlier, began experiencing chronic lung infections. These were later determined to be caused by traces of detergent frothing in his lungs, which impacted his ability to breath. Not only is this work an account of her uncle’s health struggles, but also documentation of the effects of unregulated labor conditions and unsafe factory environments in India. In this work, the proxied obstruction of the breathing organs evoke the omnipresent pollution in India’s large cities, and also the artist’s personal connection to this issue.