The works in “Afterlife,” investigate the transformative and transgressive potential of grief, loss and remembrance. Charged with yearning, tenderness, and at times, agony, several works explore the loss of self-identity and the struggle to regain coherent selfhood. Through narrative, storytelling and imagination, these ideas are interwoven with themes of mortality (our own and others), interconnectedness (or lack thereof), self-legibility and renewal. The giving and receiving of these accounts, opens up an archive of desire and meaning. For Jordan/Martin Hell, the process of sharing is akin to “digging death’s uncanny perversities as though divulging them around a camp fire upon earnest ears in the dead of night.”
Other works explore hallucinogenic, surreal states that are dislocating and catapult one into an alternate reality that differs markedly from the world we usually occupy. Love and loss are explored via temporality and tonality. There are ephemeral, serene images, filled with light and fluidity, that are only very tenuously connected to the real world and aim for a working-through of mourning for overcoming loss and restoration. They explore an imagined afterlife, with fantastical imageries of ghosts, communion with spirits, parallel worlds and dream worlds. In some works, otherworldly forms and colours are melded with influences from animation, which, says Estefanía B Flores, aim to create “superficial worlds conveying an absurdist, surrealist quality.”
Many works have a visceral nature, focusing on bodily metamorphosis and the corporeal. The processing of emotions is compared to the biological processes of digestion: slow, fundamental, and winding though the digestive organs.
The body is spliced open to express the tensions between interiority and exteriority. Anjuli Rathod says that the digestive tract in particular has fascinated her—“the slow, ugly process of transformation, the cyclical processing of material serves as a metaphor for grief.” Some of the works and writing in the show, also explore the death instinct through ideas around sex, pleasure and deviant behaviour. In other sculptures, there is an exploration of the not-yet-healed moment that signifies profound change, examined via the transgressive potential of ideas related to the fembot or gynoid—a technological extension or re-embodiment of selfhood and desire. In the book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives Jack Halberstam writes that instead of indicating naturalness, the exaggerated femininity and sexuality of the gynoids, in fact parodies stereotypes.
The world thus created is from an escapist fantasy that allows momentary reprieve from reality and has subversive potential.
Through a deconstruction of threshold moments between past and future, the works in the show explore the transgressive potentials of grief, desire, tenderness, friendship and bliss to open up pathways to radical transformation and resilience.
Participating artists:
Estefanía B. Flores, Jordan/Martin Hell, Anjuli Rathod
at indigo+madder, London
until September 30, 2023