India, July 24 -- If I had to describe Manjot Kaur's work in a word, I would call it ferocious. Very few works of art, even brave ones, are truly ferocious.

While most of us fear the entanglement of the human and the non-human, Kaur builds her paintings around it. Somehow, it makes her work even more human - because it can encourage us to question and think deeper about that we know. That's the very mark of being human.

The first painting of hers I ever saw, depicted a woman reclining on an embroidered bed in the clouds, shaded by a beautiful tree. But the woman's head was replaced by that of a bird. This half-human-half-bird had a distinct softness. It made me wonder if the hybrid entity was actually genderless; and also why I assumed ...