Artist Statement
Originally born and raised in Mumbai, I grew up learning four languages simultaneously: English, Hindi, Marathi, and my mother tongue, Tamil. Now living and working in the United States as a recent immigrant with no last name, my temporary status informs my interest in the contradictions of legitimacy and legibility within America. Drawing from the aesthetics of bureaucracy, my work considers the erasure that occurs when one’s value is translated through a stack of papers. I engage with the materials and language found in government buildings, airports, classrooms, and other spaces, where the body undergoes categorization and evaluation. Text from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services website become etchings in drywall, redacted over time, while stacks of ghostly Monobloc chairs, made from brown butcher paper, occupy space like figures in a waiting room. Single file lines of stanchions that hold TSA dog photos design a strategic maze, while carbon paper tracings of my mother tongue become part of a painting. Through these actions and objects, I examine my on-going relationship with bureaucracy, blurring the lines between the domestic and the institutional, the intimate and the formal, the hand and the machine. How does bureaucracy know me, even at my most vulnerable?
While the aesthetics of bureaucracy inform my content and process, I often juxtapose them with the more personal materiality of the home and the book. Both the home and book are equated with relationships between language and the body. Each changes with the seasons—swelling, shrinking, breathing, and aging. The body, the house, and the book are all constructed through processes of layering and stacking: muscles stretched over bone, drywall attached to studs, pages nestled into one another. This stacked quality recurs throughout my work, reflecting various demands for proof in the form of paper stacks detailing my life. These systems exude hierarchical power and rely on expendability, impermanence, and categorization to maintain a permanent state of temporariness. This is further reflected in the fact that my work is usually ephemeral, modular, repurposed, and easily dismantled.
I am currently focusing on the transformation of text into objects that investigate all of the various ways we understand (and misunderstand) the people and systems around us. I now work more specifically at trying to remember my mother tongue, Tamil, using my mother’s handwriting from her old journal as a starting point. This book houses all sorts of information including recipes, knitting patterns, budget planning and kolam patterns, suggesting a transitional moment in her life. As a result, pink insulation foam from Craigslist that once laced a stranger’s walls is cut and stacked to form my mother’s handwriting. By giving her handwriting weight, density, and depth, I materially process it and push it to become a nonsensical object of communication.
In contrast, I am also exploring how typed text, as opposed to handwriting, is the epitome of bureaucracy. If an Institution is a chair, then typed text is its legs. It is trying to disguise itself as something unnoticeable, nudging you to simply consume it for the knowledge it imparts or for the systems it needs you to navigate. I question my compliance with such forceful self-categorization. Thus I turn to handwriting; to me it's accountable for the ways in which its uniqueness fails. Sometimes you cannot read handwriting, and that is the beauty of it: the refusal and the inability to change.