Latitude 28 presents Baroda-based artist Komal Mistri’s solo show titled ‘Come With Your Light’, chronicling unheard voices reverberating behind the closed doors of the unhinged mechanised labour room. The show is on from April 12 to June 15, 2024.
In the realm of the labour room, consisting of spotlighted beds and surgery tools, lies the tale of embroidered bodies bewildered if to feel pleasure in pain or pain in pleasure. Laying on the bed, contemplating her identity, the pregnant woman wonders about her dual and frustrated state of being.
Komal Mistri spent three months in the enclosed spaces of hospitals across Gujarat. Documenting the process of childbirth that has been ritualised and considered throughout civilisations as sacred and celebratory, Mistri captures and interprets the unspoken narratives that mark the transformation of the woman’s body and psyche, a space marked by unpredictability, vulnerability, and trust.
The exhibit delves into the possibility of forming an archive of emotions surrounding the phase of childbirth. A vast majority of women are deprived of proper medical attention and are forced to push the limits of their physical capacity to complete the process. The socio-economic conditions of rural India constantly thrust women into a gender-discriminatory struggle of enduring pain beyond their limits.
She captures her complex emotions and difficult stances in women’s lives, documenting the labour room processes through interventionist photographic works and found objects, using them as the primary element of her work to manifest collective pain and deprivation. Like the family members, Mistri here takes the role of the confidante, a listener to the woes and happiness of the labouring mothers.
Mistri’s practice includes churning out the memories from the objects that inform her subjects’ living processes. Bottles of blood, placentas, scissors, stretchers and machines serve as symbols of the mechanised nature and almost apathetic treatment of the labouring patients. To capture such images is itself an act of revelation to the artist whose personal experience with childbirth and healthcare systems marks her artistic practice.
Her body of work uses altered and constructed imagery assisted with found objects resonating the grey areas of memory, identity and space. She primarily relates to the identities of a woman in a domestic space where she constantly struggles to alter her personality according to her responsibilities, excluding her right to a personal space.
