When Biraaj Dodiya paints, she stretches the pigment like a piece of cloth, or gauze. As though painting is a technique of repair. She wraps and affixes, uses paint like it’s elastic, like a bandage. She does so over metal, wood, and canvas, in thin, controlled layers. In Grid for a Disappearance, her mending takes place over large steel frames. They are outsized and disquieting; they resemble bed headboards, or the armature of stretchers. But what’s meant to hold the body at rest does not neatly resolve into comfort. Each work is an assembly of overlapped layers. Photographs are precisely placed alongside canvas and wood, which are in turn placed over the steel frames. The works are haunting, perhaps even haunted. While bodies are figuratively absent, they are suggested. Like the bodies we carry in our arms, wheel down corridors, and lay behind curtains. Wounded bodies, fragile bodies, bodies overtaken by their own frailty.
‘I find myself examining forms of collapse,’ Dodiya writes in an artist statement, ‘and the ancient human need to create systems that resist this collapse—architectural support structures, repair materials, elegies.’ In a hospital, a bed is lowered so the body cannot fall any further. It is engineering around the possibility of collapse; it’s a type of bed where the body arrives when it is at its limit. There is rarely a neutral way to look at a bed. There are, of course, the beds of pure comfort—those warm, domestic fantasies—and then there are the beds that are actually institutions, places where our bodies arrive when they are failing. A bed is a civic fact; it is where we are most helpless, most available, most dependent on another person’s hands. It’s in the arrangement of our limbs, our need for care. A bed is where we are placed when we can no longer hold ourselves upright.
Dodiya rubs down the steel frames with car patch, a.k.a. bondo, which is an auto body filler, used to buff dented cars and correct impact damage. The putty’s job, ordinarily, is to conceal: make the hurt thing look as though nothing happened to it. Under the artist’s hand, it works differently; it turns the flinty metal soft, more pliable. In her use, the bondo does not erase or turn the metal slick again. Rather, it keeps a record of what has already occurred. It offers us details: that a force has landed, a contact has been made, that an encounter with the world has left something behind. Disfiguration, Dodiya seems to suggest, is generative. Injury opens toward possibility.
Over the car patch, she adds in more layers of oil, stain, or polish, continuously reworking the steel’s surface. The bodies, those implied and evoked, edge toward horror. The body is a doomed fact. While surfaces can be smoothened, glossed, and burnished, the bodily condition still persists. Damage, the work appears to remind us, is neither final nor is it an ending. It is where everything hurtles forward from, toward a future, undeterred by the infirmity revealed by the past.
At the scale Dodiya works in, the steel frames dominate, and begin to resemble gates, even barricades. We are at a threshold, where the body is still being tended to, here, at this precipice which Dodiya has held open, inviting us in. There is a sharp difference between the story medicine tells (of cure, recovery, return to function) and the reality of a body out in the world. Daily, on our phones and screens, bodies arrive through a field of scarred images—those that are being displayed, handled, disposed of—flattened onto a screen. Bodies undone by their debility, the capacity of flesh to carry wounds, to be injured, to perish. Or, more perversely, bodies that are entirely consumed by a desire to transcend their humanity. We consume both in equal measure, and at speed; it is a continuous negotiation. Longevity science stands against a backdrop of bodies no longer considered deserving of life, both guided by the same, sinister, hyper-funded logic of capital. We are at the behest of this footage, and we must endure. It is not the same as looking at it.
And so Dodiya brings us the photographs. Each is a tiny moment, quickly captured, often monochromatic. They punctuate the installations, and add a rhythm. Each reads like a note, something previously tucked away, reminiscent of asking the artist to turn out her pockets. Specific, subjective, belonging to logic that cannot be cleanly reconstructed, nor does it have to. A spray of white water from a fountain, sticky and translucent in the light, surging against a backcloth of pink blossoms and freshly cut hedges. Wrinkled bed linen bathed in overhead neon-red as the city recedes out the window, pale, a glowing emerald green. A patterned rug, twisted into a barricade. Boys dispersed along a silver-grey shoreline; the water flat, a foamy sheen. A ceiling fan strung with interlocked paper chains—the image suggests weight and sound, as if the paper could turn metallic, could register a faint clink.
The photographs feel like evidence in a case whose charge hasn’t yet been disclosed. They are oblique, with a clinical sort of attention. The implication is not always of violence, but of a proximity to what violence leaves behind, to what violent acts can disturb without touching. Peacock feathers dragged across asphalt. A tree branch caught in a camera’s flash, heavy with leaves, extending outward with a certain deliberateness, purposeful like a gesture. The crease of an elbow marked by a faded tattoo, beads, and a knotted rope tied at the wrist; it is Saint Sebastian rendered in miniature, an arrow lodged in his chest, his face turned down. The martyr appears not as a sacrifice but residue: of what the body carries forward from the encounters it did not survive unchanged.
If narrative is a form of generosity, Dodiya withholds it. What remains is the work’s insistence that you look harder—long enough for patterns to surface, for fragments to begin, however tentatively, to cohere. Roland Barthes wrote that mythologies have an almost purifying function: they render objects innocent and eternal, and give them a special clarity that does not need explanation. These photographs work similarly, even perhaps with an update. They take things we have already mythologised—a bed in red light, peacock feathers, a shoreline, a martyr—and refuse to settle on meaning. Stare long enough, and something shifts; the category strains. Looking is vertiginous: what you think you recognise transforms; it’s still arriving, dizzyingly so.
This is the plea of abstraction. The request for our focus and our subjectivity. As participants in an attention economy of spectacle and distraction—which easily fulfils the purposes of propaganda—we are losing our ability to think in a clarified way; to do so with affect, to move toward, and even critically disregard plausibility. Dodiya’s work carries the sublime manifestations of landscape: soothing curvatures, rifts, and an inherent threat of collapse. It’s what can make a landscape so beautiful, painful: how it runs parallel with the injury and ingenuity of the body, how it curves, how it moves with a certain chaos, how it cannot be captured, or ever adequately disciplined. ‘The image I arrive at,’ writes Dodiya, ‘is a tentative map of the world.’
- Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer currently based in Madrid. She is Editor & Associate Curator at TBA21.
