Monotypes on washi, poems in pencil, installed in a wooden closet, Dimensions variable, FICA, Delhi, 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. The three volumes of Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière recorded the images and symptoms of the people who were diagnosed with hysteria and epilepsy from the physician’s point of view. The development of photography alongside played a central role in not merely documenting, but manufacturing a new reality through the photographs in La Salpêtrière, where the patients served as live specimens in the work of recognizing hysteria as a medical concept. This work attempts to offer a re-translation of these volumes, from the point of view of patients like Blanche, as well as from the misreadings of a translator who is always negotiating with several languages at any time.
A library is a constantly changing space, much like translation from an imperfect point of view of a language learner where the meaning of a word is constantly evolving. What sort of readings are possible in a library space, when I take an untranslated book as my departure point? The project took place at FICA’s reading room, that hosts collections of contemporary international and regional art, that I engaged with over the course of a month, and these readings became a core of my approach towards the (mis)translations of photographs and text.
To enter a sleep, 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.