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INSTALLATION
Three Texts, 2009
Ink on velvet
201 7/10 × 157 3/5 in 512.3 × 400.3 cm
Stone Mountain, 2016
365 Stones, velvet, glass, aluminum Variable
The hardest, the most beautiful gift one can give or be given: freedom. It hurts as it pleasures. A stone is its primary unit. Once held in the hand – luminous – nothing less will do. It becomes like a burning mountain bathed in the embers of the rising and setting sun. Near, like the breath of a loved one I want to grasp in astonishment. Then it recedes, keeps receding distant, arrogant like God. Vishnu – The face of the state? Slippery in its many avatars, seductive as Mohini, cruel as Narasimha, aloof as Shiva. Then it becomes a fabulous stone; many stones small and big, young and old, each decked out like a bride in perhaps a desperate gasp of life. A resplendent Red mountain rises.
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Missing Since 1992
88 in x 88 in
Wood, electrical wire, holders, bulbs, voltage stabilizers
Edition of 3
December 6th, 1992 will forever be etched in my memory as the darkest day I have experienced as a citizen. The idea of India as a secular state was brutally shaken that day. Pick axes and iron rods rained down on the dome to demolish it. I and many women felt that this is also a violation of the feminine. This work is an act of remembering.
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Document B, 2015
Wire and velvet on paper,
10 feet 11 inches x 4 feet 11 inches, depth 2 inches
Document B remembers the precise moment in which Indian democracy’s secular credentials were shaken. That document of barbarism lead to the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhaya 6 December 1992.
For me, it was also an attack on the female body, the erasure of the breast - that marked the triumphal rise of the masculinist right wing culture.