“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 Shreyasi Pathak, 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 and trained art-historian from India, I also use a painterly language informed by South Asian manuscript painting for intimate sized work 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.
However, in my most recent work 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.
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.
And so, I am interested in how much of the gaze and a viewer’s experience of art is determined by the body. My practice, therefore, centres the viewers embodied experience and much of my work is meant to be viewed while seated.