A Birth of a Boneless Child Debashish Paul

Debashish Paul’s first solo exhibition in London titled, A Birth of a Boneless Child, is opening at Ginny on Frederick on 6 November 2026. Rooted in the artist’s queer identity and personal history, the exhibition draws on an episode from the Krittivasi Ramayan, the fifteenth-century Bengali retelling of the Ramayana by poet Krittibas Ojha, one of premodern Bengal’s most widely read literary works.

The exhibition takes as its point of departure an often-overlooked narrative in the epic, in which two widowed queens conceive a child together. According to the legend, the child is born without bones, as the father is traditionally understood to be responsible for giving a child its bones. His name, Bhagiratha, carries a further linguistic association with the two bhagas (vulvas) from which he is born. Connecting this literary account with his own experience of growing up queer in rural Bengal, he considers how mythological narratives might offer alternative ways of understanding gender, sexuality and belonging.

In the Krittivasi Ramayan, the child born of the two queens is not presented as an aberration but is accorded reverence. Through this narrative, Paul draws attention to the presence of diverse understandings of gender and sexuality within South Asian cultural histories, predating the codification of colonial attitudes towards sexuality. The boneless child becomes a metaphor for the queer body: a body that resists fixed structures, normative expectations and prescribed forms of belonging. Rather than being defined by an absence or limitation, bonelessness becomes a condition of possibility: an invitation to imagine bodies capable of assuming different forms, accommodating vulnerability and forging alternative configurations of love, kinship and freedom.

The sculptural objects in the exhibition are made in collaboration with local women from his village, using kantha (the running-stitch embroidery style of rural Bengal), hand embroidery, and beadwork. Stitching operates here as both a material process and a conceptual framework. It also raises questions about how gender is constructed and inscribed upon the body, and how these structures might be loosened, unpicked or reconfigured.

Through mythological re-reading, collaborative textile practices and sculptural forms, A Birth of a Boneless Child considers the queer body not as something to be accommodated within existing structures, but as a site from which alternative possibilities of embodiment and relation can emerge. Bringing together personal memory and premodern literary histories, Paul proposes a space in which inherited narratives can be revisited, and identities and forms of kinship can be imagined anew.

A Birth of a Boneless Child is on view at Ginny on Frederick, London, UK from 6th November to 16th December, 2026.

Words Platform Desk
Date 6.11.2026