Monotypes on washi, poems in pencil, installed in a wooden closet, FICA, Delhi
Dimensions variable, 2022
Tuesday Lectures looks at the absence of patients in clinical-medical books, beyond them being a site of symptoms, rooted in a particular history of hysteria in a hospital called La Salpêtrière. Locating itself in an untranslated medical text and the specificities of a reading room, this project looks at our early experiences in learning a foreign language, while taking the position of a translator who does not speak any of their languages well and is in a constant negotiation with meaning.
When something is misread, it forms a third space that reveals parallel meanings that exist behind a text and remain inaccessible until experienced through translation.
To enter a sleep, FICA, Delhi, 2022
To enter a sleep is a series of intimate meetings between two people. The practice of ‘being read-to’ creates a space that suspends the reader and listener in the interior life of a text. It calls for a return to resting, to be inattentive, drowsy, to half-read and half-listen as one reads. In the poem on the left, I mistranslate a page from the clinical observations in a medical text and re-examine what it means to reside in a hospital bed for years. The bed pictured here was felt as a partial uncomfortable space by the audience, as a transit space between a home and a hospital.