Solo exhibition · 2023
Of Other, and Possibility
Identity, migration, spirituality and queer possibility.
My first solo exhibition brought new and existing painting, digital collage, photography, textile and objects into a single spatial proposition at MART Gallery, Dublin.
The queer body becomes a way to examine vulnerability and its connection to the world. Indo-Persian miniature painting provides both a material discipline and a grammar to disobey: Wasli paper is washed, chalked, burnished and dry-brushed, while the insertion of the naked male body unsettles the patriarchal conventions of manuscript art.
Material disobedience
Sufi and Christian symbols, the minaret, ritual vessels and the Urdu word ghair—other or stranger—are borrowed and repositioned inside an alternative realm. The exhibition takes ownership of otherness while holding non-duality and interdependence as working principles.
Other
A suspended textile carrying the image of a minaret into a queer spatial and devotional register.
Ewer Issues
A red flag in which cleansing vessels replace hands and feet, turning ritual objects into a transformed body.
Ghair
The language of otherness is confronted directly: distance becomes a position from which another world can be imagined.
Exhibition record
Venue
MART Gallery, Dublin · 2023
Photography: Simon Mills
Curator
Rachel Botha.
Support
The Arts Council, Cork City Council, MART Gallery and Backwater Artists Studios.
Of Other, and Possibility, MART Gallery, Dublin, 2023.