Eri silk fibres, wire, silk waste thread
Dimensions variable, 2025
This project focuses on the 19th and 20th century categories of diagnosis and disease, particularly the ‘ill body’ in both humans and dolls. Doll hospitals use the language of medicine and surgery, but yet have managed to devise tender practices outside of their institutional logic. It opens an unexamined space of translation between material culture and medical discourse: the position of ill humans and ill dolls as they manage to accord for each other equivalent practices of care.
As a part of the process in making of this video and sculpture work, I wrote poems and did intimate one-on-one, as well as public poetry readings that focused on translation. These readings with other people became a way to understand the experience of illness through language. In the process of translating, I inhabit a foreign body, and introduce a double foreignness both in the source text and my own mother tongue Punjabi. Each process of translation takes me further away from my own language. In the same way, I see a chronically ill body as an unstable body, that is going through a continuous process of estrangement, and becomes a unfamiliar to itself over time.
in the bird tree
a silk-doll चुड़ैल sleeps.
when she was born, she could only chirp or whine,
now she wears a different language,
and translates herself into a doll-sister ਡੈਣ
the word sister becomes her dead-double.
sister dies during child-birth, she becomes a चुड़ैल.
sister dies twelve days after she had given birth, she becomes a silk-doll.
sister dies unmarried, she becomes a silk-doll.
a baby sister dies before she is twenty days old, she becomes a चुड़ैल.
a silk-doll
has toes at the back of its feet
a silk-doll
a chudail no longer has a mouth
a chudail killed all male members of her family
when
silk-dolls
were buried
with their fingers nailed
her thumbs nailed
in iron rings
so she would not turn into chudail
the silk-doll just wants to sleep
Inkjet print on Asarakusui lace paper, 10cm x 7,5 cm, 2025
Photo Credits: Augustine Paredes, Christian Stegmann