Aleena is a Dalit feminist thinker and writer from Kerala. She often publishes articles in various online and print media about the intersections of caste, gender, sexuality and religion. She expresses her politics and thoughts through poetry written in Malayalam and English. Her poetry collection Silk Route was published in 2021.
After going missing for three months,
Lisa,
Suddenly appears at my midnight window.
“I have an idea. A very bad idea”
She whispers through the bars.
I, both waking and dreaming
Forgot to ask the important questions.
“What? Tell me”.
She was the baddest of us all.
The smartest of us all.
Her pretty little eyes glowed in the dark,
Like a cat,
Her claws extended.
The door creak stood silent.
I stepped out in the chilling moon.
Lisa pointed her teeth at me.
A smile, I guessed.
“This way.”
We walked through the thorned roads
We once roamed.
Trees were our houses.
Swings took us everywhere.
Pride Lands of pariah girls.
Footsteps were heard from the shadows.
We merged with trees.
A holy man with torch,
String around his torso which hold
Invisible bullets.
Lisa pounced,
He screamed.
I screamed.
Blood gushed through my fingers.
His immobile body
Lied at my feet.
I ran through the dark paste,
Night thickened into.
It was indeed a bad idea.
And Lisa?
She is still missing.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine should be stopped as soon as possible, but how? The world is showing great solidarity with the suffering side, but should it go hand in hand with humiliating, neglecting, and demonizing Russian passport holders? Can the problem be solved by putting more limitations and borders on ordinary citizens already oppressed by an authoritarian state?
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After all the materiality of the world has been grasped, the next natural step of the Great Devourer - capitalism - is to go deeper into the immaterial within the confines of our minds. As we go about our days, we seep valuable information that can be monetized directly and made into codes of control, redirection, and upkeep. A new frontier has been unhinged by cracking our minds open, where the laws are all but settled. Is the immaterial world beyond our ethical discussions and legislative apparatuses too ethereal to be real, or can a reasonable amount of responsibility be demanded everywhere?
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In Samoa, an archipelago situated closeby to the said line, this border was however not abstract. It wasn’t something that could be as easily ignored throughout the remaining year. The line was too close to overlook. By way of geographic proximity, the island chain was more likely touched and disturbed by it. In 2011 the government of the territory thus took matters into their own hands. It decided to change its own future by changing its own place in time. To achieve this modification, Samoa decided to get rid of December 31 2011 in order to be able to slip through the thread of time. While the world had remained in its configurations of time, the island had, with a blink of an eye, altered its own configuration of time. By disappearing December 31 2011, by erasing twenty-four hours, Samoa catapulted itself twenty-four hours ahead into the future.
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The works, in relation to each other, successfully embody the curatorial statement, ‘we are an inseparable part of nature and therefore always connected to each other.’ They weave together the concepts of life, love and death, therefore, establishing a coherent larger framework of the exhibition. This thematic consistency is also visible in the aesthetic production with a striking palette of cool earth tones. While the composition of the works within the confines of the gallery makes perfect sense, the overall exhibition raises more questions than it answers in regards to its larger socio-political implications. Collectively their works hardly do justice to the subject matter that they deal with.
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