barham:
restless rest
Used pillow, fragments of thinking process
2023
The pillow holds a decade of writings, written in search for identity and existence, eventually discarded here as a shrine of creation.
Among many things we find barham to be, we find a practice of making resting places for something restless (be it spirit, or emotion, or thought), often as mounds of earth raised a bit from the ground; so here, barham is a pillow which holds a process of labour.
Patriarchy manifests barham as a father-figure, and brahmanism appropriates it further as a creator-father; taking away from the fact that barham itself is a creation, and its practice, whether mediated through earth, or paper, or cloth, or thread, or language, is itself an ancestor.
Rest is restless.
PS: The concept of ‘barham’ comes from folk-practices of Bihar. Such folk-practices have been historically misapporpriated and weaponsied againts their own people.
Materialising the mundane as a shrine/art, my decision to work with ‘barham’ as a concept is an assertion for imaginative access; What the colonial and casteist gaze has termed “spiritual”, is actually an emotionally grounded materiality, that is imaginatively accessible to all.
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a village barham; image from internet
Materialising the mundane as a shrine/art, my decision to work with ‘barham’ as a concept is an assertion for imaginative access; What the colonial and casteist gaze has termed “spiritual”, is actually an emotionally grounded materiality, that is imaginatively accessible to all.
a village barham; image from internet