QUARANTANIA features the work of three emerging international artists: Neha Choksi (India), Eva Kotátková (Czech Republic) and Taus Makhacheva (Russia).

Through video, short film, documented performance, drawing, sculpture and photography, Quarantania narrates these artists’ personal lives and their historical and present-day social environments in poetic and psychological terms.

Everyday objects, rituals, sites and social structures are interpreted and re-imagined, and the subject of extraordinary transformations.

The gallery doors open onto the work of Taus Makhacheva. Born in Dagestan, the most ethnically diverse area of Russia, she is familiar with habitual reactions towards representatives of other cultures.

Her filmed, documented performances reveal various attempts to ‘infiltrate’ communities through elaborate disguise.

Her works pose the question: ‘what are we prepared to do in order to belong?’ Mumbai-based artist Neha Choksi’s muted short films, photographs, collage and sculptural works depict ritualistic scenarios that explore erasure, exhaustion, detachment and disappearance.

The film Leaf Fall, for example, records a single day’s repetitive action of stripping a rural peepul tree of its leaves.

The work of Eva Kotátková focuses on the boundaries, structures and behaviours imposed within our daily lives, from the school classroom to the home.

She transforms functionless mechanisms, shapes and memories into visually striking forms, from sculptural installations such as Parallel Biography, 2011, in which a wrought iron cage encloses a domestic couch, to the collaged drawings and objects in Work of Nature, 2011.

n The exhibition runs from Tuesday until June 9. The John Hansard Gallery is on the Highfield Campus of the University of Southampton.