Crossing Borders examines the layered politics of movement, permission, and embodiment by placing a small stop-motion animation of my mother’s childhood image inside landscape and threshold photographs from the British Museum’s digital archive. This gesture—first realised as an Instagram story captioned “POV: you borrow your childhood body to trespass every border colonialism built”—reanimates a moment from her adolescence when she was denied permission by her father to travel fifty kilometres with friends. That refusal of bodily autonomy, shaped by patriarchal protectionism, echoes the wider architectures through which women’s mobility has been historically policed, and speaks to what scholars such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty describe as the “regulation of women’s bodies as extensions of land, honour, and property” (Under Western Eyes, 1986). The parallel between domestic restriction and colonial border-making becomes sharper when read against Christina Noble’s entry into Himachal through a travel company—illustrating how ease of movement is unequally distributed, and how colonial proximity enables Western bodies to cross thresholds that remain tightly controlled for local women and their descendants. By animating my mother’s image across these archival landscapes, the work exposes the asymmetry of whose travel is authorised, documented, and preserved, and whose mobility remains precarious, denied, or invisible. As the project expands through further travel videos and digital interventions, Crossing Borders develops into a speculative re-mapping of movement, where the childhood body becomes an insurgent figure trespassing through colonial geographies that once confined her.
Hands That Weave Time
Hands That Weave Time examines the tension between embodied labour and archival extraction by tracing gestures of weaving, knotting, plaiting, threading, and making across Tamil domestic archives and British Museum holdings. By isolating only the hands—reducing faces and withholding full bodies—I foreground the continuity of embodied knowledge while exposing how colonial photographic regimes have historically fragmented brown and Black women into ethnographic parts. The screenshots sourced from the British Museum’s digital archive, particularly the restricted holdings of Christina Noble’s Himalayan photographs, sharpen a central curatorial question: Does proximity gained through prolonged residence—twenty-five years in Himachal—grant contemporary authority over the bodies captured? And when such images are accessioned into a British repository, does the institutional transaction override the present-day personhood and embodied autonomy of those hands? This inquiry resonates with Tina Campt’s argument that the Black body in the archive is forced into “aesthetic and political legibility not of its own making” (Listening to Images, 2017), and aligns with Dalit feminist critiques such as Sharmila Rege’s insistence that caste-marked labour is routinely “detached from the labouring body that produces it” (Writing Caste/Writing Gender, 2006). By juxtaposing colonial fragments with photographs of Tamil practitioners weaving in their homes today, the work asks how archives continue to assert ownership over gestures that do not belong to them, and whether the very act of “capturing” a hand can ever be disentangled from the politics of representation, extraction, and epistemic control.
The Company Painting becomes a visual and conceptual hinge for this cycle. Like many images produced for colonial consumption, it idealises Tamil domesticity, stabilises caste-coded gender roles, and stages obedience, propriety, and hierarchy as aesthetic norms. Such images were not neutral; they helped naturalise a social order in which patriarchal authority, caste stratification, and colonial policing became mutually reinforcing. Paradox of Pattamma situates my family’s history inside this longer continuum of representation and power, revealing how colonial visual regimes do not remain in the past but continue to animate domestic arrangements, interpersonal violences, and everyday hierarchies. By re-cutting, reanimating, and re-contextualising the painting, the project exposes the recursive nature of these systems—how colonial patriarchal notions sustain themselves not only through institutions, but through bodies, gestures, and intimate decisions made within the home.
Thanjavur Almirah stages a speculative return of British-held Tamil objects by placing them directly into the intimate, overfilled domestic architecture of a real Thanjavur almirah—an everyday vernacular display-cabinet that holds family photographs, toys, devotional figures, wedding portraits, plastic curios, and objects that accumulate affect rather than institutional value. Into this dense, living ecology, the collage inserts bronzes, ritual implements, terracottas, metal icons, and Company-style miniatures extracted from the British Museum’s catalogues, positioning them as if they had always belonged among the layered textures of domestic time. The gesture is both tender and insurgent: by cutting, resizing, and compositing these objects into the almirah, the work exposes how violently out of context they appear when removed from Tamil social worlds—and how completely they settle when returned to them.
The British Museum’s online descriptions of these objects continue to valorise donors, collectors, and officers tied to colonial extraction, while offering only skeletal acknowledgements of the Tamil regions and ritual histories from which the objects originate. Their metadata foregrounds provenance as possession, not belonging. In contrast, the almirah places these objects among ordinary remnants of women’s labour, children’s toys, inherited keepsakes, and the clutter of everyday life—asserting a counter-curatorial logic where value is produced not by classification, but by proximity, intimacy, and continuity.
This collage reveals that repatriation is not only a legal or museological debate, but a question of narrative, context, and custodial imagination. By embedding colonial loot inside a living domestic container, Thanjavur Almirah unsettles the authority of the museum catalogue and reclaims the right to narrate how Tamil objects live, breathe, and circulate. The work refuses the sterilised glass vitrines of the colonial archive and insists that objects return—at least imaginatively—to the cultural, emotional, and epistemic landscapes from which they were taken.
By inserting archival male bodies into the cutout of my own nude silhouette, I treat my body as an embodied counter-archive—a surface through which histories of surveillance, ethnographic discipline, and colonial restrictions are re-routed. The choice of yoga postures is deliberate: a practice grounded in breath, constraint, flexibility, and liberation becomes a way to embody the tension between being framed and reframing, between being looked at and looking back. The body becomes cartographic, mapping the absences and excesses of the archive. As Anjali Arondekar argues, the colonial archive is never neutral; it “produces the very bodies it claims merely to describe” (For the Record, 2009). In this project, my silhouette interrupts that production, recasting the nude not as an object of study but as a site of agency, refusal, and epistemic redirection.