Ratnabali Kant (b. 1956, Calcutta) is a sculptor, writer, and one of the pioneers of performance art in India. Trained in sculpture at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, and at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, she later pursued doctoral research at Athens University on a Greek government scholarship. During her years in Greece, Kant developed her first body-based performance, Rainbow of Desire (1985), marking the beginning of an interdisciplinary practice that would redefine the possibilities of contemporary art in India.
On returning to India in 1986, Kant introduced what she termed “installation performance” – a synthesis of sculpture, choreography, painting, poetry, music, and ritual, in which the artist’s body became an integral sculptural and conceptual medium. Between 1985 and 2005, she created a groundbreaking body of performance works addressing gender, violence, ecological crisis, displacement, and the human condition. Drawing equally from Indian aesthetics, folk traditions, mythology, and modernist experimentation, her practice challenged conventional distinctions between visual and performing arts while asserting performance art as “an art of resistance.”
Kant has also maintained an active career as a sculptor, producing both gallery-based and public commissions, including works at the Garden of Five Senses in New Delhi. Her performances, documented in the publication Ephemeral Steps, Enduring Imprints (2006), have become foundational to the history of contemporary Indian performance art. Recent retrospectives and renewed scholarly attention have highlighted her pioneering contribution, talking about her practice that anticipated many of the interdisciplinary, socially engaged approaches central to contemporary art today. Through a career spanning more than four decades, Kant has remained committed to expanding the expressive possibilities of art while foregrounding the body as a site of memory, protest, and transformation.