Shadowless Light and Gestures

Beginning with alpana, the Bengali practice of drawing on the ground with rice paste during auspicious occasions, this work considers gesture as embodied memory. The craft form of alpana is a way of organising light, attention, and space through repeated bodily action. Its knowledge is transmitted across generations, through women, as a form of lived but unspoken practice.
Objects have their own gestures. Gesture is not evidence for ethnographic interpretation, nor material for archival stabilisation. Instead, it is a form of knowledge that precedes language and resists conversion into legible representation. It is a form of knowledge that operates outside standardisation, and therefore outside the logics that render experience uniform, comparable, and controllable. To translate a gesture fully is to erase what makes it operative. It carries memory. It is a silent persistence against the dominance of words. It appears in the movement of a hand, the fall of light, and the rhythm of making. Gesture is a condition to be encountered. The work moves between landscapes, bodies, and intertitles, tracing how gestures persist across time and displacement. Women in the work, encounter gestures outside their inherited contexts.
Light is a central presence: shifting across courtyard floors, foggy mornings, rough ground, dark screen, projected on bodies and objects. In this changing light, gestures appear and dissolve. Memory is distributed across bodies, materials, and inherited forms of attention.
I hold the gestures
I am held by innumerable ancestral women.
Each of my gestures carry my mothers within me.
Gesture becomes both trace and carrier, something that passes through bodies without belonging to them. It becomes a counter-practice: a way of reintroducing the humane into narratives structured by dominance, abstraction, and control. What persists are situated variations, forms of life that refuse to be standardised without loss.