Eleven hand-woven carpets and two paper prints are hung throughout the gallery, cascading to the ground. The forms that inhabit the woven textiles represent a mass, a collective, or a network of people as an interlaced, connected weave. The work explores the meaning of the verb ‘to people’, which can suggest populating and inhabiting a space, wilfully or enforced, but can also be read as a work that is ‘for people’, referring to one person or multiple individuals.

The pixelated figures create a modular, blurred landscape of objects and human forms in transition. Together the carpets constitute one image of the nexus of people coming together in large urban cities. The work is produced for the exhibition in reference to the city of Doha and the wide networks of people who reside here.

Demos | Crimson, Azure (2017)
Shown at: Delhi Contemporary Art Week (DCAW), Nature Morte, Bikaner House, New Delhi (2021)

Multiple fused corian surfaces
1 x 1 m

Demos (Crimson, Azure) are two works in a series of figural patterns from pixelated renditions of human bodies in crowds. The experience of being in the presence of many other sentiences can be one replete with contradictory sensations – a sense of fullness, of being in a flow with others, of ecstatic communion, intimacy, anonymity, claustrophobia, solidarity and heightened awareness of the proximity of other breaths, other bodies. Demos explores these sensations by deploying colour as a marker of affect.

The acceleration of the assembly line is interrupted by accidents. Legs, arms, hands, eyes, and other bits of life become unpredictable crowds (found ex-votos from a Mumbai church) at the altars of progress and speed. Bodies assemble behind the limbs – pixelated human forms – to constitute a counter-collective. Who breaks whom? What is broken and what is healed?