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.
I am currently working on the larger project, ‘Walking withoutside History’, that examines how disabled and other non-normative practices of walking chart psycho-geographies and map-making/marking while moving through space and time. While this project is in thematic conversation with the long history of walking in land and performance art, I wonder what a crip’d Benjaminian flâneur or Situationist dérive would look like.
As a visual artist and trained art-historian from India, I primarily use a painterly language informed by Islamic manuscript painting within the textual structure of the colonial-institutional document and book. Manuscript painting allows me to explore non-Western depictions of multi-perspectival space and time alongside the document/book that has often been used historically to control, civilise and governmentalise the body.
As a writer-poet, I also look at text as body—the points where it aches and experiences pleasure—as well as ‘translation’ as a nuanced form of accessibility to language and script in the diverse South Asian context.
I am interested in how much of the gaze and a viewer’s experience of art is determined by the body. My work is therefore very material and usually in intimate sizes meant to be viewed while seated. I frequently use site-specific architecture and built body-centred structures to facilitate alternative modes of viewing.