Let me give you a scene to visualize. It’s 2001 and you’ve run back home after school, hungry and sleepy. It’s the day before summer break starts and you can’t wait to be out of your school uniform. Abo Onzima had indicated in the morning that there would be onla wunkhrwi and aloo bathwn for lunch, only your favourites.
Not that you complain but lunch on the day following a sudden chakka bandh was always going to be whatever little was available at home and grown in the kitchen garden. It didn’t matter that the new refrigerator had just been installed – red, shiny and clunky – the frequent and lasting power cuts (sometimes for days) ensured that food went bad anyway.
Post-lunch naps were mandatory because Abo Onzima couldn’t have you interrupting hers. Needing to have something your way, you defiantly move from the bed to the floor the moment she turns her back to retreat to her room.
The floor you lay on is cool against your naked back. You are turning 10 soon and your breasts haven’t formed. You’re allowed to be innocently naked for the time being. The voltage is low and the ceiling fan overhead is lazily going about its day, creaking and complaining of its dusty, unoiled parts.
The window that opens to the front yard lets in a slow balmy afternoon breeze, the faint scent of joba flowering right outside the window, and you are happy to be sweaty, sleepy, and fed, butt bare on the ground, without a worry of impending homework or Miss Doris’ stern voice reminding you to enunciate your words correctly.
Your eyes are closed. You are happily drifting off to a dream of running in the fields with the other kids and goats in the neighbourhood, without the worry of putting food on the table, or needing to be ahead of everyone at work. It might rain tomorrow, and you might go catch tadpoles in the village pond. You’re a boy’s boy and a girl’s girl. You’re the goat that grazes out on the field across your home. You are you and you are yours.
Soon you are 15, still running around screaming-singing everyday across the length of the hall that runs right through your home, but you’re told the image of yourself in your head is wrong. The mirror shows someone who is you but not familiar, a face that doesn’t smile much anymore, shoulders that hunch differently, shoulders that hunch to hide.
Seventeen now, and several steps into womanhood feels like a question in the test from that section of the syllabus they never taught you. An imposition, all you know of it is that it’s rife with limitations. You don’t understand it, you never did. You don’t know why people glorify it. You are not you, and you are not yours.
You look in the mirror, searching every day for that 10-year-old, the boy’s boy, the girl’s girl. You look for the glee and the sparkle in the eyes. You are not you, and you are not yours.
Background artwork credit: Logan Voss on Unsplash
You want the mirror to crack, cracking right in the space between your image’s eyes – cracks travelling through the extremities of the mirror’s surface, and into the depth of the image rupturing through inherited memories, lived realities and the dance of gender, ethnicity, caste, religion and sexuality that image presents and is expected to perform – cool glass melting around your image and coating you in chrome, slowly pooling in a puddle from whereat your new form rises, forming bends and breaks you couldn’t have imagined forged from the sounds of your silence, the sinewy strength of your imagination, the heaviness of the entirety of your aspirations; resplendent, ethereal, Chrome.
You treasure this form and put it on a pedestal in the castle you have built in air; someday you will don it.
When body dysphoria hits hard, and you are not you and you are not yours, you step into your silence climbing up the stairs to your castle.
Hark! On the day the moon turns blue, cats fly and birds slither,
when dream melts into reality
Blood, sweat, tears and everything in between
will transmute into Chrome.
* * *
While Chrome was staged as a live durational performance-installation, it aspired to be witnessed as the version of a dream on exhibit. However, the presentation might have varied monumentally from the way dreams are dreamt and forms are created within a dream; it might have been much more jarring and triter in comparison to what the mind is capable of rendering.
Within the context of the exhibition titled ‘Queer Objects 1.0’, the body of work cloaked in flesh, lived experiences, inherited memories and traditions housed also the metaphysical ‘queer object’ of the artist’s dreams, their aspiration to transform, their Chrome self. The artist was at once several ‘queer objects’, an interactive work of art, the site of a performance, and an interlocutor spinning stories and telling tales of pasts, presents and futures.
The metaphysical ‘queer object’ needn’t have been recognized by a distinct visage. Within the context of the exhibition, it assumed the authority and agency to present its objectification. While the ‘queer object’ intended to lay the onus of the performance largely on the audience, there was a desire to explore the possibility of an affective exchange / relationship developing between the art object and the audience.
Did witnessing the ‘queer object’ make the audience curious? Did it make them cringe? Did it make them yawn or roll their eyes? Did it make them see parts of themselves in it? Did it make them want to touch it, or illicit violence in them? Did it disgust them, evoke nothing but apathy in them, make them wonder what the point of the performance was? What did this objectification do to them?
* * *
A second chapter of the performance-installation titled Chrome 1.2 – Objectified invited participants to assume the role of the ‘queer object’. The invitation, an extension to Chrome, opened the designated space within the exhibition to willing participants to occupy the space, assume authority and present their own objectification. Participants were afforded the agency to choose their level of interaction, be it a passive embodiment of their queer identity, or an active engagement with fellow exhibition-goers. They were afforded their tellings, narratives and histories. Within this designated space, individuals were not merely observed, but appreciated as vital components of the exhibition’s narrative – their presence, a testament to the diversity and profundity of queer identities.
The first and second articles in this series written by artists Mekuriiko and Hima, respectively, can be read here and here – Editor.
About the photographs: The author performing Chrome and interacting with exhibition visitors (behind a screen created by a mekhela garment, a family heirloom). Photo credits: Anubhav Deka
Thanks for bringing these series of articles from the exhibition … in a way it brings the exhibition, albeit in a limited way , to us and makes us ponder.
Why the mekhela garment and the patterns on it? Curious to understand its significance.
The mekhela has been a very curious motif throughout my life. Its presence is representational of generational inheritance of identities, joy, pain and struggle. I would like to think it represents different kinds of yearning, longing and desires too.
I questioned myself, why mekhela and not dokhona. The thought that distinctly stood out is its relationship with my mother and her side of the family, and their distinct identity and relationship with their own heritage of being Xaranias (indigenous people who went through the process of being Sanskritised) – and hence my own relationship with what I can consider my tradition.
In many ways mekhela was my mother’s garment of “choice” and comfort growing up, and upon marriage she had in many ways had to relinquish it. I grew up witnessing this loss of agency of my own mother over decisions of how to dress and in extension, her own life. I also saw her longing and desire to be clothed in the garment of her choosing and eventually, after years of struggle and negotiation, being able to wear it again at her choosing, during the years leading to retirement, without having to think about facing any repercussion in society.
Thus, the mekhela represents to me her freedom and agency over her identity/visage and body that I want to inherit in the ways I occupy and present my identity and body.
The items pinned on to the mekhela are CT scan images of lungs and pelvis. I would like to offer this opportunity to the people witnessing to come to their own conclusions about the usage of these two items. And I would like to hear what thought emerges when you are now cognizant of what these items are.