namrata arjun

Please Come In (2020)
Performance Still

The work drew on text from alt-news, an Indian non-profit fact-checking website, and Hannah Arendt's text Truth and Politics, which was performed while covering the microphone in red yarn, to highlight the cognitive dissonance created by the rhetoric of truth and lies, real and fake that the Indian media landscape (and soundscape) was overwhelmed with during the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protests in 2019-20. The text was eventually torn up, and stuffed in condoms which were laid on steel dinner plates and handed out to the audience, who were all asked to follow the performance to a dinner table laid elsewhere within the premises of the auditorium, and set up the plates there. This was to mark the blanket censorship of all news about sectarian/religious conflict during the time as a way of supposedly "protecting" religious sentiments but inadvertently ended up silencing the voices of minority populations affected by the change in law.