Ontological Strip Tease 
 Namrata Arjun

Formulating a painterly language that queers time and posits it as non-linear and layered, my practice challenges the gender binary, by articulating my mis-recognition (as someone who identifies as queer) within rigidly gendered historical/familial photographic archives, as a way to re-frame larger issues around minority rights, representation, and the filtering of the political through the intimate, familial and personal. 

The body (what is normatively read as the “female” body), in first person point of view, works as a personal framing or measuring device with its potential to visually interrupt a universal subject position, enact particularity and serve as an index of time and space–enacting gestures/handling photographs/performing personal or cultural memory or fiction, and implicating the viewer. Usually set in a space defined by a system of multiple perspectives, the figure/s alternate between dysphoria and joy. My work also probes the binaries of reality/memory, history/fiction, figure/ground, form/colour or body/architecture - through the representational and illustrative treatment of the photographic, news or historical archive - and complicating its official status as truth, by relativising its various registers as object/performance/fiction and memory. 

I use the frame within a frame as point of reference, whether architectural or photographic, or begin directly with a colour ground, and allow figures/compositions to spontaneously emerge by being identified in the stains – setting up painting as a site for active remembering/dreaming/conjuring and excavating figurative forms informed by personal/historical/found/media photographic archives as well as somatic or body-memory, with the viewer’s eye as a fulcrum – setting up a psychological space, and re-enacting a double or triple consciousness. 

In creating processes of translation, intersection and mediation informed by logics of painting, I seek to layer information into an opportunity for disturbing the fixity of the archive (particularly the photographic archive with its colonial history that framed logics of othering and extraction), upending its singularity and making it more porous, granular, and elastic. And in the process, to open up the possibility of creating codes that avoid censorship/escape the gaze of power, and produce, rather than re-enact a subject position. Investigating the interfacing of paint and historical or intergenerational memory, I seek to position paint as phantasm, a carrier of psychic space, or as post-humanist techno-science – a technology of the unconscious, or of co-producing a subject position. The relationship between painting and painter is refigured into a quasi-relationship between analyst and analysand, a model centring the transformation of the maker, rather than the binary of object/maker, and questioning assumptions about an imagined (viewing) community. 

Text Namrata Arjun
Date 29-08-2022