Infrastructural Intermediality as Institutional Choreography: Contemporary Dance and Visual Art Institutions in India

This article examines the migration of contemporary Indian dance into visual art infrastructures, theorizing this shift through the concept of infrastructural intermediality – a form of institutional choreography where economic systems, spatial architectures, and curatorial protocols shape choreographic form, labour, and spectatorship. Drawing on genealogies of Indian modernism, the performative turn of the 1990s, and the rise of alternative art spaces, it situates the Kochi-Muziris Biennale as a paradigmatic case of institutional improvisation. A case study of Padmini Chettur reveals how re-skilling for exhibition contexts (re)defines contemporary dance aesthetics while exposing neoliberal and caste-class hierarchies that choreograph visibility, value, and precarity in India’s cultural economy.