Efface: Death Becomes Her

Overview

Efface: Death Becomes Her is a body of work that examines eternal grief as a continuum between a desired state and the imminent and natural occurrence of death. It is an attempt to recognise the symbiotic links that bind the body to its pervasive representation and the elegiac quality of the natural environment. The paradoxical states of fantasy and evasion on the one hand and fetishistic constructions of instruments of destruction on the other seem to be a characteristic of modernity. Postcolonial cities and their latent myth of progress together with the incipient phantasm of wealth distribution in the era of emerging globalisation have culminated in the production of highly visualised but nevertheless exceedingly affective bodies. Deleuze and Guattari remark, “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.”

As such, I believe destruction of the very crucible of our existence – that is the natural environment – is no longer in the domain of visuality and perception alone. However, very little is articulated on the role of the “destroyer within” or to put it as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: the role of the “affected body”. The body as a site where nature and destroyer reside in the very same space and time is a difficult but nonetheless challenging concept to envisage and detangle. For example, through modernity, individuals are offered very little space for critiquing the construction of their sense of self in relation to existing categorisations of bodily appearance. This sociability of the body, which invariably signals communicability, is constructed within environments individuals are born into that constrain their ability simply to “celebrate natural embodiments”. The urban experience in particular evokes dialectical relationships such as between seclusion and sociability; ecstasy and horror; synthetic and natural. Each relationship, contaminated at its onset by representation, is a nuanced variation of artifice, mirage or nightmare. Further, the intensity of the illusive quality of urban living is proportional to the scale and density of the metropolitan experience and collective living.

Efface: Death Becomes Her is an attempt to pose tangible questions such as “What do the living want to know? Is it what the dead would want to tell them?” Finally, just as the sublime can be experienced as moral purity, it cannot be known without the necessary prerequisite of a particularly painful exigency.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 8.