kokki is Priyageetha Dia’s first solo presentation in Spain at The Ryder Projects . Works developed between 2023 and 2025 come together through an inquiry into how new technologies can communicate, visualise, and reimagine practices of refusal within post-Fordist labor histories. The multi-media works formed through techniques such as computer-generated imaging (CGI), generative speech synthesis, lenticular printing, and relief drawings are used as tools for perceivingthe de-visualised histories of forced and indentured labour, from the plantation to the disciplined body of financial capitalism. Encouraging connections between tool, form and output, kokki engages the capacities and limitations of contemporary technological tools in analysing global somatic work histories and structures.

kokki grounds itself in a site-specific response to the building that now houses The Ryder Projects – a former ham-drying factory in Madrid’s Tribunal district. In Dia’s interpretation, the site epitomises how modernity conjoins technology and the organisation of flesh. Reimagining the hanging lines of cured hams, the spatial arrangement reflects the mechanised cadence of the assembly line, where flesh is segmented and reorganised by capital. Kokki, meaning hook or clasp in Tamil, is a new video work developed for the occasion of this exhibition, which extends the ideas introduced in the preceding studies alongside Dia’s recent research at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. The work engages Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human, which argues that blackness and other racialised forms of being were not simply excluded from the category of the “human” but violently included as plasticity. This two-channel video installation uses metal hardware to construct an entity-like form, drawing from the pierced and suspended body in kavadi attam, a ritual of endurance and devotion practiced by Tamil Hindu communities. The work engages with the relationship between bodily sacrifice, industrial machinery, and systems of production. It draws a line between the material culture of ritual and the infrastructures of mechanisation, particularly those found in slaughterhouses and factory lines.

The video moves through a speculative sci-fi landscape, where the material quality of engine parts and carcasses
converge. This speculative terrain operates at the intersection of the interior and the industrial, where the sensorial registers of labour and extraction circulate as pervasive conditions. Archival footage of kavadi attam, sourced from online platforms, appears as a practice extended into another dimension, its forms stretched and recontextualised within a speculative, machinic landscape. The work draws on the symbolic and material dimensions of bodily endurance, asking how forms of devotion intersect with systems that render the body both expendable and instrumental. Through these layers, the installation reflects on the violence of the category of the human itself, its exclusions, its entanglement with racialising and animalising logics, and its continual production through the management of flesh.