“you are a soul. a world. a portal. a spirit. you are never alone. you are organs and blood and flesh and muscle. a colony of miracles weaving into each other.”
― Rupi Kaur, Home Body
In Home Body, Elia Alba, Baseera Khan, Sola Olulode and Maya Varadaraj offer visions of personhood that transcend the labels, limits, and roles prescribed on Earth. Here, the body is not merely a vessel for participation in the material world. Instead, it is what poet Rupi Kaur describes as a colony of miracles—a home, or interior world, to return to and find refuge in. As we approach a year of learning to live with social distance and self-quarantine, a reimagining of the body as sanctuary has never felt more timely or essential.
With a focus on the nuances of cultural identity and gender expression, the exhibition explores embodiment as a site of performance and experimentation. A laboratory where the energetic relations between the material and the immaterial are in a constant state of fusion, fission and combustion. This collection of works—timeless yet concretely of this moment—tests the capacity of the body to resist the enduring pressures of capitalism, propagandism and sexism that have historically aimed to confine it. Viewers are dared to, instead, imagine the body as unbound, and gesture as a tool of radical resistance and communication.
Elia Alba’s soft sculptures, or hand portraits, provide a glimpse into the distinct auras of her sitters. Instead of relying on the eyes as windows to the soul, Alba transmutes the hands into the primary portal through which to access the rich interior life of another. Through a process of photo-transfer onto fabric, these hands retain a representational likeness yet remain subject to the artist's own interpretation and embellishment. Alba states, “hands are like emotional barometers. The gestures we produce when we speak are not merely random movements used for emphasis, but are tied to our thoughts. It’s a bodily action that represents information and thus has an indirect effect on the world.” Alba materializes the immaterial, offering a series of gestures as biographical windows into the lives of her loved ones.
In contrast, Alba’s Nommo dolls offer a different type of information. Rooted in the mythologies of Mali’s Dogon tribe, this series of dolls foregrounds collective over individual identity. They embody a race of ancestral spirits, undefined by gender, and are positioned in expressive poses that communicate a wide array of non-verbal information. In the folklore, the Nommo visited Earth over 1000 years ago to share lessons from the solar system, which makes you wonder what news they are here to share today, and what role the body plays in communicating it.
Where Alba’s sculptures survey different modes of address manifested through the body’s exterior or extremities, Baseera Khan’s sculptures seemingly cast their gaze inwards, towards the organs, blood, flesh and muscle . Khan’s “Seats” evoke hints of the anatomical through their biomorphic curves, hooks and bulges that conjure the body’s internal systems. Composed of pleather, grommets and traditional Islamic textiles and trims, these organic shapes consist of inorganic, commercial materials that are at once known and unknowable. They evoke a dual sense of public and private, domestic and industrial, and Khan expertly magnifies this tension through their refusal to submit to the binary.
In Khan’s literal suturing of these elements, perceived by many to be diametrically opposed, the humorous absurdities of capitalist consumerism emerge—plastic masquerading as “skin” and metal penetrating the “skin” to recreate a porosity that preexists. Khan plays within these interstitial spaces, inlaying flesh-toned swaths to add an even deeper dimension to these already multidimensional works. These subtle troves reward an active viewer, and Khan’s choice to hang the seats on the wall instead of installing them parallel to the floor keeps the viewer on their toes, turning a prescriptive relationship between subject and object, self and other, on its head. In their largest “seat”, Khan incorporates photographic imagery, inserting a portrait of Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar into one of the inlays. This poignant commentary on what it means to have a so-called “seat” at the table, or take up necessary space while remaining functionally obscured by the architecture of the broader system, speaks to the complexities of representation.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, representation takes on a more figurative form. Sola Olulode’s deep blue lovescapes and Maya Varadaraj’s meditative mandalas materialize the complex interiority of their subjects. These womxn and non-binary subjects, who express their agency through gestures like the gaze or the kiss, are at once tender and defiant—they acknowledge the viewer yet remain wholly unreliant on the viewer’s gaze for permission, as they rule a realm of their own creation. Despite a shared interest in depicting the nuances of identity expression, Olulode and Varadaraj approach their respective cultural references distinctly.
Maya Varadaraj tests the absoluteness of India’s pre-independence imagery by meticulously collaging popular calendar advertisements into new messages. In her refusal of the historic propaganda that circulates what she describes as only “two distinct types of women”—deities and progressives—Varadaraj literally carves out space for a more robust spectrum of representation. In Apply Forces, Control Movement and Perform an Intended Action, Varadaraj further rejects this narrow prescription of womanhood by, in her own words, “injecting photographs into the machine aesthetic.” Here, she is interested in the disjuncture between the fact that women are often treated like machines yet, in popular imagery, are only approximate to machines when this relationship is sexualized or commodified to sell products. In these works, the artist’s own body is represented and is truncated by the contours of the machine while, at the same time, asserting mastery over it. Apply, control and perform—the language used to title the piece—affirm this refigured power dynamic.
In Sola Olulode’s drawings, one senses the willful erasure of a power dynamic—bodies don’t oppose, they blend, swallowing one another in countless, reciprocal gestures of consent. These intimate scenes of togetherness explore the fluidity of Black, British, queer identities. Olulode’s explorations of what she terms “queer intimacies” depict the tumescent moments before a kiss or embrace or, in some cases, simply a state of uninhibited being. While it may seem as though these drawings privilege only lovers, there is in fact a third body present—that of the artist. Through her unique mono-printing process, which involves kneeling and drawing on the reverse of the paper to produce what will ultimately become an inverted image on the front, Olulode’s gesture and trace is captured as architect of the scene. As such, the paper becomes a sponge that absorbs the excess, infusing her drawings with limitless layers of material and conceptual depth.
Elia Alba, Baseera Khan, Sola Olulode and Maya Varadaraj each transform their selected medium into an infinite multiverse of indirect connections and direct confrontations. The juxtaposition of their works in space produces a palpable tension that encourages viewers to question their own relation to, and position along, the vast spectrum of identity. In Home Body, viewers are encouraged to perform the solitary work of introspection yet are consistently reminded that, in the words of Kaur, they are never alone on the journey to find “home”.