Collage perverts the social, political, and cultural specificity of images. Collage excerpts and recontextualises accepted meanings to challenge viewers to see a whole beyond the fragmented reality at the surface. Collage is an act of queering that promiscuously subverts established hierarchical binaries and normative thinking. Following the ground-breaking work of the German Dada artist Hannah Höch, collage is my medium of choice.
The right to privacy is enshrined in the national legislation of most countries around the world. Section 377 of the IPC was struck down in September 2018 on the basis of violating Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Indian Constitution, the last of which guarantees every Indian citizen’s right to personal liberty. Yet privacy laws have always had to contend with conventional morality and propriety. The current crisis around overturning Roe v Wade in the Unites States highlights the precarity of individual privacy whenever it comes into conflict with the conservative mores of heteropatriarchy. This series of artworks explore what might happen when desire is criminalised, when privacy is weaponised, when certain bodies are deemed “unnatural” beings meant to be “fixed”.
When secrecy becomes indispensable for survival, alienation and unhomeliness come to haunt every corner of our “homes”. Sometimes we hide in plain sight, sometimes we’re forced into closets of our own making but what if my closet is my body is my room is this city? What if thriving in liminal spaces isn’t enough? What if I engulf the world and swallow it whole, what then?
For marginalised non-conforming individuals, our homes and our very bodies become sites of surveillance for the heterosexist State Apparatus.
My native language Bangla has no gendered pronouns but it doesn’t offer the simplicity of the word nonbinary. Our experience of reality is fundamentally structured by language and so my mind is a patchwork of linguistic fragments, an endless métissage. I borrow names from one language, feelings from another while I live in both, never whole but never static.
The queer body emerges at the intersection of marginalities. Here, I’m borrowing from Deborah King’s theory of “multiple jeopardy” according to which identity markers such as race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, caste result in multiplicative discrimination against the precarious body. Can this precarious body laugh? Can this precarious body sing? My mother became gradually disabled since the year 2008, the year I turned nine and my sister merely two. Young children will keep any number of secrets to hide that their family doesn’t resemble a normative “happy” family. I’ll never know the true extent of my mother’s suffering yet she has often turned to humour to deal with her deteriorating faculties. Below my mother’s crip body emerges as an event in the audio-visual collage featuring snippets of conversation between her and her two children.
