MFA Work In Progress

This 35-panel cyanotype installation is of a single image: two girls dancing, one looking at the other with an intimate softness. 

The panels are printed slowly, by hand. Each sheet is coated with chemistry, exposed to light, washed in water, and hung to dry. The process is repetitive and physical. My hands are present in every stage. The deep blue of the cyanotype holds a sense of memory for me – something submerged, something revealed through care and patience. The fragmentation across 35 panels mirrors the way queer South Asian histories often survive: in pieces, in whispers, in gestures rather than official records.

The installation is less about reconstructing history and more about feeling toward it. It imagines a lineage where sapphic love was not hidden but lived openly in courtyards, in shared glances, in ordinary domestic spaces. At the same time, the work holds space for everyday intimacy between femmes: sisters, friends, cousins, women whose closeness shapes entire worlds.

Alongside the cyanotypes, I am working with Rekhti poetry from the 17th and 18th centuries, which is a form of Urdu verse that centered women’s voices, relationships, and desire. I am translating selected lines into Urdu calligraphy and transforming them into large, expressive compositions that will be laser cut into wood. These calligraphic panels will be suspended from the ceiling at varying heights, creating an environment viewers move through physically. The language becomes architectural — not just something to read, but something to stand beneath, to pass through, to feel. Together, the blue panels and suspended text form a layered space where image and poetry carry the presence of those who came before us.