Do You Feel Them?
A Sapphic Uncovering of Lost South Asian Desires
Do You Feel Them?
A Sapphic Uncovering of Lost South Asian Desires
Some histories arrive in fragments. A line of poetry. A gesture in a painting. A trace that suggests a life once lived but does not fully reveal it.
Do You Feel Them? explores sapphic South Asian histories through cyanotype, sound, sculpture, and Urdu poetry. The work emerged from encounters with archival fragments that hint at relationships between women yet leave many questions unanswered. Rather than attempting to reconstruct a complete history, this installation dwells within the spaces where certainty gives way to imagination.
Throughout the exhibition, the colour blue acts as both material and metaphor. The cyanotypes' deep indigo surfaces evoke memory, distance, and longing. Rebecca Solnit writes that blue is the colour of "the distances you can never quite reach." Here, blue becomes a way of thinking about histories that remain partially obscured — close enough to sense, yet impossible to fully grasp.
At the centre of the installation, two women dance across thirty-five cyanotype panels. In front of them, excerpts from rekhti poetry — a literary tradition known for writing in women's voices and depicting relationships between women — appear as visual echoes through urdu calligraphy and a soundscape. Together, image, text, and sound create an environment that moves between presence and absence, intimacy and distance.
This work does not seek definitive answers about the past. Instead, it asks what becomes possible when we approach historical gaps with care, curiosity, and imagination.
Do You Feel Them? is an invitation to spend time with those fragments: to listen closely, to sit with uncertainty, and to consider the traces of lives that continue to resonate across time.
