Initial Thoughts

Since opening a few years ago, I have had a very ambivalent relationship with the Alsdorf galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago. On the one hand, I am deeply grateful that, as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I have the privilege to visit the museum whenever I like, and I can enjoy the objects in the space at my leisure. Soon, I will graduate, and will no longer be able to regularly visit the galleries, to examine the sculptures housed there, to sit on the benches drawing, writing notes, or simply in quiet contemplation.

But there is another side to my experience. As a person of South Asian decent, I cannot separate myself from the knowledge that these were once devotional objects, objects of contemplation and veneration, objects that in a sense had a life. I cannot ignore that it is a room full of bodies (whole bodies, fragmented bodies) that can never again exist in the world the way they once did. They are displaced bodies, bodies that carry the history of colonialism and the scars of violence and exploitation alongside the memory of a culture that has faded into the past. I too carry these histories and these memories. My body is a testament to the exploitation of my ancestors as slaves and indentured laborers, caught up in the world-wide river of colonialism. I too am a displaced body, forever marked by the past, never able to return home.

There is no incantation that can heal the fractures embodied by my flesh, just as there is no solution to the problematic space these objects occupy. They are here, in this place. I am here, in this place. This is the reality from which we must work, the material from which we must build strategies for our existence. This is not a project I embark on alone, it is a shared discourse that many people, throughout history and across the world, continue to take part.

I experience an extreme contradiction when I am in this space. On the one hand I am in a room full of bound bodies, stripped bare, cowering under the harsh gaze of passer-by. I want to clothe these bodies in context, in history, in stories. I want to scatter flowers on the floor, pile fruit at their feet, drape garlands around their heads. I want to light incense, hire pundits to chant, and adorn everyone’s heads with vermillion. Anything to abate the harsh glare. But simultaneously there is a sense that these objects are invisible, simple geological anomalies to be navigated around. Eyes are averted, gazes held straight ahead. An endless march past. I want to stand in that river and beg people to stop, to enumerate with a scream the price paid in order to allow these objects to be here at all.

I see this performance as an intervention. Not an act of history writing, of laying out the facts, bleak and unforgiving. Not a confrontation, an assigning of blame, a weighing of culpability. It is a balancing act between what it is possible for me to ask and what it is possible for the viewer to give.

Considered attention. Questioning. Pause. Displacement. Confusion. Acceptance. These can be asked, these can be given.