namrata arjun
House, Body, River, Column, 2019
Mixed media installation (yarn, lycra, stretcher bars, video on monitor, oil on canvas and printed archival documents)
Dimensions Variable
The works featured in House, Body, River, Column are an exercise in grappling with/re-interpreting a complicated, posthumously available colonial archive currently located at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London. The archive, a series of letters containing dreams collected from the Indian subcontinent by Charles Gabriel Seligman, an an anthropologist at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the mid-1920s. The project attempted to apply the emergent discipline of psychoanalysis to “diverse” populations under British colonial rule and further racialist science. The project was abandoned by Seligman, or at least remained unpublished, because it defied the logic of racial othering. I examine these abandoned dreamscapes to probe the possibility of a (violent/dissent-crushing) portrait of Empire, and as a potential for an archive that “talks back”, as posited by historian Erik Linstrum. I use the archive to draw parallels with the current political climate in India, with its growing hostility towards minority populations, and totalitarian tendencies. I also see the archive as jumping of point to examine the colonial legacies embedded within the memory of painting, probe the efficacy of dreams/art as a site of resistance, and deal with the constraint of making “the frame” nomadic or collapsible.
House, Body, River, Column, 2019
Mixed media installation (yarn, lycra, stretcher bars, video on monitor, oil on canvas and printed archival documents)
Dimensions Variable
House, Body, River, Column, 2019
Mixed media installation (yarn, lycra, stretcher bars, video on monitor, oil on canvas and printed archival documents)
Dimensions Variable
House, Body, River, Column, 2019
Mixed media installation (yarn, lycra, stretcher bars, video on monitor, oil on canvas and printed archival documents)
Dimensions Variable
House, Body, River, Column, 2019
Mixed media installation (yarn, lycra, stretcher bars, video on monitor, oil on canvas and printed archival documents)
Dimensions Variable
House, Body, River, Column, 2019
Mixed media installation (yarn, lycra, stretcher bars, video on monitor, oil on canvas and printed archival documents)
Dimensions Variable
House, Body, River, Column, 2019
Mixed media installation (yarn, lycra, stretcher bars, video on monitor, oil on canvas and printed archival documents)
Dimensions Variable
House, Body, River, Column, 2019
Mixed media installation (yarn, lycra, stretcher bars, video on monitor, oil on canvas and printed archival documents)
Dimensions Variable
