namrata arjun
(un)making liquid memory, oil on hand-cut linen, 36 x 30 inches, 2022
(un)making liquid memory, oil on hand-cut linen, 36 x 30 inches, 2022
(un)making liquid memory, installation view, 2022
UBS Gallery/Bard Exhibition Centre, New York
(un)making liquid memory, installation view, 2022
UBS Gallery/Bard Exhibition Centre, New York
(un)making liquid memory, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches, 2022
(un)making liquid memory, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches, 2022
(un)making liquid memory, oil on hand-cut linen, 36 x 30 inches, 2022
In creating processes of translation informed by the logic of queering/painting, I seek to transform archival information into an opportunity for disturbing its fixity/singularity (particularly the photographic archive with its colonial history that frame the logics of othering and extraction) making it more porous, producing, rather than re-enacting subject positions.
Investigating the interfacing of queer figuration, paint and historical or intergenerational memory, I seek to position paint as a phantasm, a carrier of psychic space, or as post-humanist techno-science, a technology of the unconscious, or of co-producing a subject position. Aided by the material quality of paint – the fact of it being a pigment, its capacity to evoke the liquid forces of the body interior, colour’s ability to evade objectivity by shifting in response to colour relationships positions it as an an agent of queer world-building and retrieving memory.