< Sad doll disease >
People send messages to hospitals, asking how their doll can be fixed or helped. The doll “surgeons” are part-craftsmen, part-doctors, and use medical language that becomes a comforting gesture, and opens a space between domesticity, material culture and clinical institutions. I see this figure of an ill doll as a poetic space to understand how illness affects a person over an extended period of time, where language and diagnosis become insufficient and the body does not respond to standard treatment or timelines.
Single channel video, 2024-25 (excerpt)
5:03 min
5:03 min
Sad doll disease is an experimental film that borrows its name from an illness that occurs in old plastic dolls of 1940-60s.
They were made of cheap plastic which started to disintegrate, and leaked through their eyes and joints, slowly infecting all other dolls in the vicinity. The work references the language used for repair of old dolls in a now defunct doll hospital, to understand illness from the perspective of a patient and a caretaker’s experience, that remains absent in documents produced by clinics and medical institutions. The work is part of an ongoing research on the parallels that exist between the experience of being mistranslated in poetry practices and misdiagnosed in medical spheres.
The work uses an archival footage of a doll being made in the year of 1988. The video was originally made for a government craft training centre in India that keeps records of regional crafts across the country. The original sound was a documentary description of how the doll is made, in English that suggests a western gaze and the voice of the woman dollmaker is absent. I erased this dominating sound, to infect the video with a narrative text of illness as it is experienced by the dolls and their caretakers.
The languages used are Punjabi, and English.
The work uses an archival footage of a doll being made in the year of 1988. The video was originally made for a government craft training centre in India that keeps records of regional crafts across the country. The original sound was a documentary description of how the doll is made, in English that suggests a western gaze and the voice of the woman dollmaker is absent. I erased this dominating sound, to infect the video with a narrative text of illness as it is experienced by the dolls and their caretakers.
The languages used are Punjabi, and English.
People send messages to hospitals, asking how their doll can be fixed or helped. The doll “surgeons” are part-craftsmen, part-doctors, and use medical language that becomes a comforting gesture, and opens a space between domesticity, material culture and clinical institutions. I see this figure of an ill doll as a poetic space to understand how illness affects a person over an extended period of time, where language and diagnosis become insufficient and the body does not respond to standard treatment or timelines.