Fever

Fever begins with one of my earliest memories: lying on my grandmother’s lap as she took care of me while I had a fever. It was someone's birthday. My sister, cousins and I were all together, watching a film in a slightly darkened room, the fuzzy glimmer of the screen pulsating in the darkness.

The memory stayed with me as a way of holding several things together: fever as a state of hibernation, but also of transformation; the body’s process of creating antibodies; and memory itself, as something that shifts and changes as it is carried through time.

The works draw from fragments of family memory and archive, and imagined geographies. A space that forms in my mind, moving between what I've heard from family, where I am currently, things that interest me and things I want to surround myself with. Craters recur throughout the drawings. I think of them as sites of impact, but also as different kinds of beginnings: hollowed-out spaces where things can gather, grow or mutate. They shift between feeding bowls, ponds, eggshells, carriers and portals—forms that can hold both absence and possibility.

Documentation photographs by Anupam Diwan and Jeet Sengupta.