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.
Please Come In (2020)
Performance Still
Please Come In (2020)
Performance Still
Please Come In (2020)
Performance Still
Please Come In (2020)
Performance Still
Please Come In (2020)
Performance Still
Please Come In (2020)
Performance Still
Please Come In (2020)
Performance Still
Please Come In (2020)
Installation view
Please Come In (2020)
Installation view
Please Come In (2020)
Installation view
Please Come In (2020)
Installation view
Please Come In (2020)
Installation view
Please Come In (2020)
Installation view
Please Come In (2020)
Installation view
Possessed (2020)
12 x 12 inch
Oil on Wood Panel
The interior scenes featured in the set of paintings titled Possessed (2020) draw from photographic sources of the the anti-CAA protests at Shaheen Bagh in India, in 2019-20 and the Sudanese Zar ritual, which is framed as an idiom of feminist resistance. Protesting bodies crowd outside the window, with little regard for the overdetermined structure of perspectival space, or the figure/ground dichotomy. The equally disobedient geometric, mosaic flooring further fractures this dichotomy, opening up multiple spaces within the picture plane. The expressively handled figures, icons and bodies exist on the threshold of paint mark and illusionism, past and present, across time and culture, illuminating and sustaining each other. The wetness, liquidity, and viscousness of paint, is an equally important vehicle for evoking the the feminine and the fluid as a counterpoint to the dry, conceptual or dematerialised laws and systems that territorialise bodies.
Possessed (2020)
12 x 12 inch
Oil on Wood Panel
Possessed (2020)
12 x 12 inch
Oil on Wood Panel
