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Writer's pictureAnuj Daga

Reflections: The Waiting Room

Deepanwita Dey Doctoral Scholar (Madness and Trauma Studies)

Indian Insitute of Technology Bhilai



It was a pleasure interacting with your work and exhibition on 'The Waiting Room' at ICAS 13. I have always been fascinated with the idea of 'waiting'. Although a lot of people often associate the term with a tortuous experience of anxiety, immobility and stagnation (often constituting an unsettling test of one's patience and efforts), for me the term also suggested a sense of anticipation, a sense of hope (or perhaps the futility of it), of something happening - moments of stasis leading to (perhaps hopeful and fruitful) change. What I loved about your exhibition is how it materializes all of these ideas and contradictions associated with the notion of waiting into art, stories and objects that makes us rethink it. I loved how you curated the entire space and concept of the lobby of the university from a space of rest, of pause and lingering around to a space of  contemplation and reflection. 


Being a literary scholar myself, I was very fascinated by the narrative approach to the entire exhibit, where we get to creatively engage not just with the art but also the poems, flash fictions, art books, drawings, photos and images and the lived experiences of individuals at the margins of society. The exhibition was not only informative but had an affective force perhaps emerging out of the politics of the subjects described and also the agency of the researchers bringing these voices to the fore, while adding their own unique touch to it. I found the stories and narratives from 'Niche Milte Hain' especially moving - (people who constitute an indispensable part of most upper/middle-class and elite households, but are forced to remain invisible deprived of any space of their own) and the road chronicles of labourers from the Manali-Leh Highway. 


The exhibit made me realize how easily these lives are forgotten or even worse left unacknowledged, and how important it is to listen to their stories. Unlike other museums that I've been to, I absolutely loved how your exhibit forced the spectators to engage with these stories affectively, how it demanded us to pay attention by engaging all of our senses - our sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. How the entire exhibit is about individuals waiting for opportunities, for hope, for change and for people like us to act. From the display of the Afro wigs and head Mannequins, the time-pass gateway, to the home-assemblage and architecture for circular migrations and the rainbow bridge of the Supernova Land, I loved how the exhibit did not allow us to be passive spectators and urged us into an insistent gazing -  to observe, to pay attention and to feel. 




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