Citizen-Non-Citizen (2023)

Performance, Duration- 6 mins.

A square of flour. A square window. A pixel. A box.

A square of flour forms an island on the floor of a gallery-space.

A space to mimic ephemeral histories- where oral stories and traditions would be drawn into sand and mud pits to share and pass down through generations. The flour used in Indian homes en masse, is primarily used to make ‘Chapatis’ - an Indian flatbread – transcending caste, class, and economic status as a staple food.

This island of raw untold stories, surrounded by window-frames holding rangoli stencils acting as borders. These unhinged, reclaimed window-frames- turned-stencils are meant to imprint the words ‘home’ and ‘land’ onto the ground. These gated edges are meant to distance the audience, to hold space within this square for the very body that has formed the borders in the first place- the artist. Within this 6-minute-long performance, the artist recollects her familial belated legacies through narratives of theory, stories of the Asian Koel/Koyal bird, poetry, and autobiographical confessions.

The improvised body-language of movement paired with the scripted and partially spontaneous speech in the performance, further allude to the dichotomies of freedom within boundaries. And further disturb the rigidity of lines that can look like cracks that can look like gaps that can look like home.