bodyspeak.wav (2024)
This text and sound installation in English, Hindi, and Urdu played with the the distance between the meanings and sounds of words. While 'qaabil' in Urdu means 'able' in English, 'abal' in Hindi means disabled. These words and their meanings in poems are wrapped around discarded books from UC Berkeley’s libraries and reading rooms. The two framed collages are redacted and abstracted words and body forms from the pages of the Renaissance book, that canonised a certain sculpted body as the ideal. The vinyl seascape emerges from the Urdu word, ‘madad’, meaning help, relief or succour.