A Look at Our Body's Bridges: Striking Portraits and the Story of the First Woman on Earth

Autograph, London - This three-person play on South American feminism is presented alongside Charan Singh's 'Your Tongue in My Mouth,' an intimate study of Indian trans communities in the 1990s. Laura Aguilar, the late Chicana artist, lived with depression. A friend took her on a road trip to New Mexico, where Aguilar took several nude selfies in mystical landscapes. These images became a central series that

London's Autograph Gallery first commissioned an exhibition of Aguilar's in 1997, a year after he made Nature Self-Portrait, so it's something of a homecoming, a generation later. Aguilar's lines, folds, and cracks sometimes disappear into desert landscapes, simulating the shapes of a boulder or a tree. At other times, his body is an incoherent and soft flesh that cannot be kept under harsh and barren conditions. These images depict the paradox of a body that is both over-visible and overlooked.

This is the beginning of three simultaneous exhibitions at Autograph about unruly bodies. In the first and largest, Our Bodies Have Been Bridges, Aguilar's story continues through two younger artists who also use their bodies as anchors to seek healing, truth, and connection to ancestral feminine knowledge. In a family-album-style account of matriarchy and rituals, Other Stories/Tariches Bravas, artist Quioltzinteli recalls scenes from her childhood in the Ecuadorian Andes.

Upstairs, this joins seamlessly with Charan Singh's Your Tongue in My Mouth. As the unforgettable title promises, Singh's work is a joyous provocation, but also a serious meditation on desirability, sexuality and reciprocity—when certain bodies are seen by some as a burden, a threat.

Singh's vividly colored portraits of Hijri, Kuti and trans people combine sensibility and realistic representationalism – the authenticity of the subjects contrasts with the choreography. The poses and beautiful hand-painted backgrounds behind them evoke a world of fantasy and escapism. Hedge and regal portraits like Umrao and Sonu's have a timeless elegance: the subjects' decision to wear traditional salwar kameez or anarkali, their glittering embellished fabrics, their bodies adorned with henna and bandi, are deliberate gestures that also belong to a longer history in South Asia. These portraits are statements of dignity that claim their right to the place without words or apologies.

The subtle tension between realism and artifice takes on particular urgency against the backdrop of waning trans rights in India. In March 2026, legislative amendments to the country's Transgender Persons Act of 2019 removed protections related to gender identity and raised profound questions about bodily autonomy, recognition, and the right to self-definition. A timeline of transgender history and rights, displayed on a table in the center of Singh's exhibition, situates these intimate portraits in a longer struggle for visibility and legal recognition, grounding gestures of self-improvement and self-expression in a changing and often hostile political reality.