Fever

Fever begins with one of my earliest memories: lying on my grandmother’s lap while she took care of me because I had a fever. It was someone's birthday. My sister, cousins and I were all together, watching a film in a slightly dark room, with the fuzzy glimmer of the screen in the darkness. The memory stayed with me as a way of holding several things together—fever as a state of hibernation but also transformation, the body creating antibodies, and memory itself as something that changes as it is carried over time.

The works draw from fragments of family memory and imagined geographies. Craters, which also come from my grandmother’s recollections of her childhood, 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.