mera mel | the dirt within me
میرا میل

mera mel is Urdu for the dirt within me.

The installation brings together tiled forms, soap sculptures and an experimental moving image piece in which a cleansing ritual is performed.

I’ve been thinking about how spaces can hold pure and impure connotations and how the body somehow carries both at once. When I first started working with soap, it was this dichotomy that intrigued me, and to make sense of it, I played with the soap through its translucencies, transparencies and infusions of dirt. The forms end up looking almost jewel-like and pristine, the material itself meant to cleanse.

For the experimental film, I try to address the strange tension between intimacy and secrecy, between wanting to look and knowing that you are perhaps looking somewhere you shouldn’t. Working with video to record the performance made me think about how, as artists, revealing is a conscious choice, a decisive act. What is shown, what is withheld, and what is allowed to remain unseen.

Who decides what is pure? Is it our thoughts, our beliefs, the systems we inherit?

It is the mel [dirt] within me that is familiar, the mel within me that makes me human, the mel within me that is not to be cleansed away.