Dead fish to Flying Bird – Relational patterning and Decolonial Readings of Women’s Labour and Care
- Raghavi Chinnadurai, 2024, Curatorial reflection of Kolam exhibition at Primary, Nottingham ( 2024-2025)
My entry point into the Kolam exhibition emerged through fieldwork in Thanjavur, where I first engaged with kolam as a threshold practice situated between domestic labour, ritual obligation, and cosmological order. Rather than relying on oral explanations alone, I turned to theorists such as Gift Siromoney, whose work examines the kolam’s geometric logics as cosmological mappings of order and equilibrium ¹ and David Shulman, who positions Tamil ritual forms within wider frameworks of cosmic repetition and renewal.² These accounts helped clarify how kolam operates simultaneously as a patterned surface and an epistemological system. This grounding informed how I approached the contemporary photographic archive of Palani Kumar and Hairunisha Kasim Moulana—particularly the need to consider mapping, rhythm, and adjacency not as aesthetic choices, but as methodological tools for reading images differently within institutional space.
What emerges when a photographic archive is reorganised not through chronology, geography, or authorship, but through pattern, relational adjacency, and the grammar of embodied ritual? Kolam (Primary, 2024–25) takes this as its starting provocation. Instead of treating photographs as discrete evidentiary units anchored by provenance, the exhibition extends ongoing debates in curatorial studies, anthropology, and archival theory by proposing that patterning—derived from Tamil feminist, domestic, and ritual knowledge—can operate as a critical method for seeing, mapping, and theorising images. The project does not claim to resolve the long-standing tensions of archival interpretation, nor does it position kolam as a corrective to colonial taxonomies. Rather, it situates itself within an evolving research trajectory that explores how contemporary counter-archives might be encountered through relational logics rather than institutional hierarchies.
The exhibition engages directly with Kumar and Moulana’s substantial contemporary archive, which documents caste violence, ecological destruction, gendered precarity, and working-class labour—in many cases producing visual evidence that has entered legal or advocacy contexts. Their practice aligns with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s call to “unlearn imperial rights to the image,”³ reminding us that photographic encounters involving marginalised subjects cannot be understood through aesthetic frameworks alone. In the South Asian context, Zahid R. Chaudhary’s analysis of “visual economies of pain” further underscores how images of suffering become entangled in competing registers of witnessing, consumption, and political urgency.⁴ Working with such an archive within a UK institutional context posed methodological challenges: how to prevent the images from being absorbed into a homogenising global “South Asian” category, and how to maintain their relational specificity without over-determining the viewer’s encounter.
My decision to temporarily dissolve provenance—removing textual anchors such as dates, locations, and descriptive labels—emerged from these tensions. Drawing on Ann Laura Stoler’s argument that archives must be understood as “epistemological experiments,”⁵ I approached arrangement itself as a form of inquiry. Rather than guiding viewers through a linear or didactic narrative, the patterned installation allowed meaning to surface through adjacency. For example, the placement of a woman’s cracked feet next to cracked agricultural land generated an eco-feminist reading of labour and ecological precarity—an interpretation not embedded explicitly in either image but activated through their relational proximity. Elsewhere, a vertical spine formed from domestic interior scenes at the bottom and public labour scenes at the top revealed spatial continuities between interior and exterior forms of women’s labour. These configurations were not predetermined; they emerged through the act of patterning.
Thinking about these curatorial decisions through the lens of kolam was instructive. In Tamil practice, the kolam’s dot-grid imposes a disciplined geometry, yet the loops and curves connecting those dots allow for improvisation, ornamentation, and embodied differentiation. The form is both rigid and fluid, structured and interpretive. Purnima Mankekar’s notion of felt knowledge—knowledge produced through affect, sensory encounter, and embodied relationality—helped articulate how these patterned installations produced meaning beyond textual description.⁶ The viewer is not positioned as a passive recipient of information but as an active interpreter navigating rhythm, density, repetition, and pause. This relational mode of reading resonates broadly with Black curatorial thinking on “fugitive planning,” which emphasises improvisational, collective, and relational forms of organising knowledge that exist alongside and against institutional ordering. While Kolam should not be read as a direct extension of such genealogies, these frameworks informed the ethical stakes of working with adjacency as a structuring principle.
As the research unfolded, it became evident that lifting kolam wholesale into curatorial structure risked reinforcing some of its own limitations. The rigid geometric kolam—the pulli kolam—could impose excessive order onto an archive that resists containment. Some images insisted on singularity; others produced interpretive tensions when grouped with visually or thematically adjacent material. The floral, curved, and improvisational aspects of kolam—those often practiced alongside or beyond the grid—offered a counterpoint. They allowed space for ambiguity, drift, friction, and slippage, all of which became central to the work of assembling the exhibition. Instead of treating these disruptions as curatorial inconsistencies, I came to understand them as necessary elements of an accountable relational methodology: one that allows movement without collapsing into unstructured fluidity.
The final installation—with a dead fish near the entrance and a flying bird near the exit—did not aim to produce a narrative arc but instead invited viewers to perceive rhythm and transformation without resolution. The transition indexed ecological devastation, casteed dispossession, and working-class resilience, but without prescribing a fixed interpretation. These patterned transitions echoed the exhibition’s broader methodological aims: to foreground the archive’s relational textures, to resist flattening its political stakes, and to create space for encounters that hold both structure and drift.
In this sense, Kolam operates less as an application of an indigenous form and more as a methodological negotiation. Patterning can reveal relationships that captions obscure. Dissolving provenance can open new vectors of meaning if handled with care. Tamil cosmological mapping can interrupt Western institutional taxonomies, but only if its own internal tensions—between rigidity and openness, repetition and improvisation—are acknowledged and held.
Ultimately, the exhibition invites a set of ongoing questions:
How can curatorial arrangements remain accountable while embracing ambiguity?
What forms of epistemology emerge when archives are patterned rather than classified?
How might cosmological, feminist, and ritual knowledge traditions inform institutional practice without being instrumentalised?
These questions remain unresolved by design. Just as kolams are drawn and erased daily, the curatorial methodology that emerges from them must remain iterative—open to revision, responsive to friction, and aware that meaning often emerges in the slippages between forms.
Draft Footnotes
- Siromoney, Gift. “Patterns in Kolam Drawings.”
- Shulman, David. Tamil Temple Myths (relevant sections on ritual cosmology).
- Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism.
- Chaudhary, Zahid R. “Afterimages of Violence.”
- Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain.
- Mankekar, Purnima. Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality.