“Ah, my old enemy… Stairs.”
—Po (Kung fu Panda 2, 2011)
Bipedal walking in humans is considered so ubiquitous that the word, ‘pedestrian,’ is understood as dull or ordinary and yet, to “walk” in many cultures is figuratively equated with living and thriving. But how do you walk out in protest when you can barely walk? Or stand up against injustice when you are too tired to stand? And if you don’t, would you be considered, ‘spineless’?
As one half of the artist duo, Resting Museum, with Shrey Pathak (they/he), my practice uses rest, disability, and crip humour as methodology to intervene in art and design history discourse and archives. I am interested in the aesthetics of the incomplete and unruly, the performativity of the missing body, and how they can be used in institutional and infrastructural critique.
My work looks at the physiological and political dimensions of human movement and speech and the structures—tangible and intangible—that determine them. And so, much of my larger work takes the form of site-specific interventions that work with the built environment’s capacity for allowing or disallowing certain kinds of bodies in its space. Through these, I try to form certain ‘publics’ physically and virtually through practices of sitting, resting, moving, and participating together.
As a visual artist using the South Asian miniature painting technique, I’ve been pushing back against romanticisation of the immense physical labour such painting requires by using technological devices as extensions of my artist hand to explore more sustainable modes of production. Through the use of technological and human assistance, I seek to move towards a "prosthetic aesthetic".