Raheema Begum

‘God is not a Square, God is cross’, ‘Parmeshvar ke sirf chaar kone nahin hain’

‘It isn’t so hard to find inspiration in Baroda. The past few months have been tight with debate, dissent and its dissolution. This was a performance that surfaced at Vivan Sundaram’s strategic reclamation of democratic art space at the eve of the 6oth year of Indian Independence. A confluence of diverse notions of poesis , this performance, is for me an assertion of my body, as a Muslim woman with all its markedness, within the parameters of institution, nation and godhead.The effort is to shoulder the project of embracing, recasting and reclaiming all of them. Enveloping my insider/outsider position within each fractal of this moment and space, between stretching and slouching, this work spans the betrayal and anger of God, woman, man (as exemplified by Christ) and democracy in today’s Gujarat. This work comes from a self that is moving within a cube, one set by the trauma, gravity and despondency of the aftermath of genocide, both on one community and other communities. Emerging from the paradigm set by this workshop, the performance is a siege of the mundane normalcy of the university space to articulate voices far beyond its (current) scope: the shadow-lines of rape mapped on the tryst of exploited women’s bodies starting to realise ‘freedom’. In terms of type-scape and struggle with form therefore, the self morphs itself into varying positions to grapple with movement. And the release is , in this case in breaking the cube, and ironically, in an act of prayer after. The workshop was dedicated to Nasreen Mohammedi and Bhupen Khakkar , artists who enriched and nurtured this institution and Indian art, each with their own trajectories of identity. And as art historian Santosh Sadanand reiterated again, for each one of us, it’s about time someone drew a line. So, says the macrocosm, God is not a Square. Stop being so linear.

Text from '12 Sheffield Building'

Everyone’s maladies in 12 Sheffield Building seemed to wear them out, except Sridevi. Sridevi was the most absurd and pushy among them. Ella, whose ruination they were living off was carrying on on welfare. And the rest of them did menial work, cooking jobs, baby-sitting…They lived the kind of life that relegated their men to spaces which were negotiable, given the need. They managed to be cheerful and abusive, towards each other, but also the world at large. It was pretty clear to Seema during the incandescent taxi ride from Byculla that this was going to be the last time she ever boded with hostel life. She wanted the freedom, the irregularity and all the promise that a part evangelical establishment could never offer. She just had never felt at home around people of her age. It wasn’t that she shied from their sense of order or decorum, no, her own mind was regimented enough to allow for discipline. And among all the things that she chided herself for, the lack of decorum had to be thrown in ,along with various other gaping ills. If it wasn’t for this one, her superiors at any given establishment could definitely pull her up for some other fine strand of unworthiness from deep within a Pandora’s box which she wanted to cough out or simply drop off at the first local train station like an orphan child. She was an angry, young, wild woman. And when she found herself in Ella’s derelict apartment, it was Sridevi who welcomed her. She slept.