how does one say queen in islam, 2020 / full HD single channel video, sound / duration: 14:19 minutes

text by shaunak mahbubani

An Ode to Infinite Murmurations

Dear rah,

I've always wished I could sing. I am enthralled by the ability of the singing voice to create intimacies across the longest distances, transmitting both tender and heavy emotions with such effortless ease. I see these abilities mirrored in your practice. Your work affectionately synthesizes the familiar and the complex, alluring us across boundaries with gentle care.

I'm delighted to see traces of your practice from 2018 and before, in this new exhibition in 2022. As I remember from our conversation during Saavadhaan, you were immersed in the format of embroidered sculpture as a medium of portraying stories from your immediate environment and broader kinships. In hindsight, the series 'Shrine of Memories' can be seen as indicating your inclination towards a praxis of finding meaning in the realm of the domestic, even setting up the foundation for the atmospheric framework of the living room on the upper level of the show.

Threads from this rigorous pursuit of medium endure in multiple works across this exhibition. Most prominently as celestial avatars and adornments in the video installation 'How does one say Queen in Islam'. I like to imagine these sculptures as mediators. Each helping navigate the portal you and your collaborators, Sophie Soobramanien and Hibotep, conjure in this radiant video poem. The portal is initiated through the intergenerational knowledge of your Nanna, Amma and Khala. They call the comforting lure of sleep to cradle you into the land of dreams. Invisibilized feminine temporalities across red skies and droplets of rust, lush forests, fields and gardens, and the mighty waves simultaneously occupy the portal that we, your audience, your kin, follow you into. The defiant nature of the voices, songs, and prophecies emanating from your ancestors — warriors and caregivers — resonates in the body language of the portal's mystical guides. It is beautiful to see your explorations with body performance from your early days in Amsterdam become one of the foundational elements in this work. Having a fertile peer environment for experimentation is one of the biggest gifts an artist can receive, and I'm so excited to see more performance centered work from you as your practice leaps forward.

From lullaby, to the whiff of comfort food being prepared by your mother's hands, I feel engulfed by a blanket of interdimensional intergenerational feminine love. In a sublime transference, I feel held, my need for maternal comfort momentarily assuaged. Unlike many of my trans-queer kin, I am fortunate to have the support of my parents; yet I have never known the security of the maternal lap, or joy of having ones hair oiled and braided in the way a person assigned daughter at birth might. I feel boundlessly grateful to experience a sliver of these vulnerable moments via the invitation into your radiant portal. I dream that one day we will share a round of fugdi, cementing us as xisters for the uncertain futures before us.

I recognise one of the lush landscapes from the video as the contours of the inquilabi satin quilt 'Blanket of Solidarity'. This fierce pink homage to Muslim women protesting all over the country against the draconian amendments to India's citizenship laws in the winter of 2019-20 can be seen in a line of works that directly confront escalating violence against minorities in India. I can trace this line through 'Bashaoor', 'Shrine of Memories', 'Blanket of Solidarity', 'Index of Dystopia', 'Gastronomical Essays', 'Anatomy of a Dissenter', and 'saher'. To list these works here is to underscore the courage it takes to continually raise your voice during a time that could see you or your family attacked for this work. Many spew theories about the rise and downfall of fascism, but very few know what it is to live with the anxiety of receiving news of the arrest of a loved one, or even worse. It breaks my heart to know that as a curator, ally, friend, even with my upper caste, hindu-born privilege there is very little I can do to physically defend you or your work. The one thing I certainly am able to do, is remind you that your work, your voice is so precious. A lazy viewer might compare your watercolour painting 'saher' to the few dozen works that emerged from that period of protest. However, in this work I see reflected the hundreds of women that I encountered on the national highway not as mere objects or iconography, but as their full complex selves. I see them gossiping, admonishing young ones, sharing food, hoarding food, tired, radiant, laughing, hopeful in the face of all odds. This tender depiction could only have come from someone who has lived with these women, knowing them as ammi, nanna, khalas, knowing that they live their own form of feminism, a resistance on their own terms.

In following your practice, I can also see that you effectively deploy a powerful strategy in the face of power — humour. Your video 'Gastronomical Essays' starts with the trigger warning "May be triggering to those with sensitive stomachs, and others who are property sensitive and personhood intolerant. This video may be unsettling for neighbours, delusional, and friends, complicit". The video goes on to detail a recipe for tackling dissent including measures of police batons, internet shutdowns, and sedition arrests. I love this tongue-in-cheek chutzpah that continues in the sculptures 'Habitat of Dissent' and 'A little poem' both breaking the tension of the domestic in this current show.

We do a disservice if we speak of resistance in a monochrome light. Along with hope and courage you also speak of the other side, of exhaustion in the face of a seemingly endless fight. Through surrounding yourself with those who face oppression at the intersection of multiple axes — cis-heteronormativity, settler colonialism, race and religious discrimination, institutional apathy, just to name a few — you know that you are not alone in this fight. The antidote to exhaustion, as we have both discovered along our own paths, is kinship. The care of our kin, both natal and chosen, allows us to falter, collapse, mend, and reignite. Our queer families see us beyond the gender binary when we can't even look in the mirror. As whole and deserving of love when we only feel the void. I see all of these emotions and more shine through in your new painting works. Two of the works 'alter' and 'embrace', stand out in their capture of deep loving connections between two gender non-conforming brown people. In Sick Woman Theory, Johanna Hedva posits these acts of care as the greatest forms of protest. They elaborate, "To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community."  I see this call towards community also echoed in your painting 'a bed not big enough', depicting the scene of a bedroom all painted in blue, with seven figures of varying ages and their cat all sharing a bed. The intimate act of sharing sleeping space, not uncommon across the Global South, reminds us to keep expanding limited familial units into larger networks of interdependent care.

It gives me such joy to see many of your ideas being developed in synchronous simultaneity as other Indian artists I also deeply admire. Great minds, as they say, think alike. I can see a concurrence of experience with Vidisha-Fadescha, in agreement that trans-queer bodies do important work in their very acts of survival. With Tsohil Bhatia, I see parallel explorations in the domestic realm, finding multiple meanings in acts of cooking, and other activities that may be considered mundane.

In this time when we are jumping from one crisis to another, the mundane seems deeply desirable. A yearning to sleep for a few hours longer without the news jolting me awake. A yearning to speak about your new explorations at length without the next urgency breathing down my neck. A yearning to cook all three meals in a day without deadlines dashing by. I dream that very soon I'll come over to yours for some biryani. We'll have a whole day to prepare the dish from scratch, and you'll sing for me in that radiant voice. I dream you're never restricted in your choices, singing your songs from all the notes your heart hungers for. And when the day comes that I feel helpless in the face of mounting dread, I'll tap into your portal of infinite murmurations. Cradled, enabled by the secrets of oceans and thunderstorms. 

with love,

Shaunak