Installation for degree show exhibition.
"This work examines invisible identities, those that specifically cross over race, gender and sexuality.
Being invisible yet visible; the South Asian woman who identifies as lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer, is often an identity that is, silenced, hidden, and un believed. Yet as a racialized woman her body is coded and gendered, and assumed heterosexuality projected onto that body. Where the language of 'queer' is read implicitly as White, its construction erases South Asian queer women.
The crux of this work is a process of revealing language, deciphering codes of difference, and (re)reading queerness differently as an identity which has race applied to it. Through collating interviews and portraits of women's stories, and weaving them into Bengali poetry hidden within the cloth; it seeks to throw light onto the (in)visibility of South Asian queer women.
The patterns are inverted characters from the Bengali alphabet, which conceal the poetry that underwrites the cloth. Asking the viewer to reexamine what it is they are looking at, and the unknown voices it contains. We do not all speak the same language; it is in acknowledging differences that we are able to see others.
A sound piece accompanies the work where you can listen to the piece of poetry. The poem which wouldn’t be the same if translated, speaks of challenging our perception of racialized queer identity, by listening to the silent voices, hearing the invisible stories, and by setting light to blackness we can see reflected, the blinding whiteness that masks our unspoken shadows."