REsentment
2024-Textile
REsentment….what does it mean to resent?…to live with anger that boils under your skin. In this explorative, performative collaboration with the imagined artist Rekha Bhatta, Malashree partakes in the ancient practice of tying knots. “It is with care that I present my textile installation.
The different elements of the triptych reflect each other, but unlike a mirror, this reflection comes across as distorted: like memories that won’t leave you.” REsentment is a nod to the goddess of time, destruction, and death, and to angry women everywhere. Though her anger is supposedly divine and yours is supposedly earthly; in an unjust world, it is hard to parse the difference.
REsentment….what does it mean to resent?…to live with anger that boils under your skin. In this explorative, performative collaboration with the imagined artist Rekha Bhatta, Malashree partakes in the ancient practice of tying knots. “It is with care that I present my textile installation.
The different elements of the triptych reflect each other, but unlike a mirror, this reflection comes across as distorted: like memories that won’t leave you.” REsentment is a nod to the goddess of time, destruction, and death, and to angry women everywhere. Though her anger is supposedly divine and yours is supposedly earthly; in an unjust world, it is hard to parse the difference.
Paintings
Retrospective to the I
2023, Multimodal, Textile, Painting, Installation, Poetry-Prose
Engaging in the I through a combination of journal entries, poetic writing, discussions of materiality, subjectivity and ontology, letters, short stories, memories, and art pieces. I situate myself in this great, complex world. In the end, I try to frame the I through the lens of care-related ontology, taking a leaf from post-humanistic and postcolonial feminism AND poetry. We must care if we are to be and become. The Retrospecitve functioned both as a thesis and as an exhibition. The question asked here is “Who gets to be the I?”
Thesis PDF
Engaging in the I through a combination of journal entries, poetic writing, discussions of materiality, subjectivity and ontology, letters, short stories, memories, and art pieces. I situate myself in this great, complex world. In the end, I try to frame the I through the lens of care-related ontology, taking a leaf from post-humanistic and postcolonial feminism AND poetry. We must care if we are to be and become. The Retrospecitve functioned both as a thesis and as an exhibition. The question asked here is “Who gets to be the I?”
Thesis PDF
Sieve---through
2023, Künstlerhaus, Vienna, Textile, Woodwork, Light
Through Sieve---through, the divisions between the real artist, Rekha B, who is imagined, and the other artist, who is not imagined, begin to crumble…like dirt. The bed-frame is constructed in collaboration with Rekha, you know the imagined one?-- an 80 year old famous artist, who lives somewhere in the hills of Nepal like a recluse. The upper deck is woven by Rekha, her old body still strong enough to create taut nylon intersections.The bottom deck, woven by the credited artist (MS), becomes a conduit…I want to grow I want to grow, it says. Yet, there is space for dirt, mud-a simple metaphor for foundation, earth, home, belonging- to sieve through. And so it does, the bed was inaugurated somewhere else, it has already been used as a sieve, now there is more dirt here, and now the shadows of these woven pieces interact with each other. It is always on MS’ mind: the various knots that create us, the various narratives that individuals hold, how we look at people through prisms.
Through Sieve---through, the divisions between the real artist, Rekha B, who is imagined, and the other artist, who is not imagined, begin to crumble…like dirt. The bed-frame is constructed in collaboration with Rekha, you know the imagined one?-- an 80 year old famous artist, who lives somewhere in the hills of Nepal like a recluse. The upper deck is woven by Rekha, her old body still strong enough to create taut nylon intersections.The bottom deck, woven by the credited artist (MS), becomes a conduit…I want to grow I want to grow, it says. Yet, there is space for dirt, mud-a simple metaphor for foundation, earth, home, belonging- to sieve through. And so it does, the bed was inaugurated somewhere else, it has already been used as a sieve, now there is more dirt here, and now the shadows of these woven pieces interact with each other. It is always on MS’ mind: the various knots that create us, the various narratives that individuals hold, how we look at people through prisms.