Sounding the Future: Queerness and Post-Human Love in Tejal Shah’s Video Art

Identifying as ecosexual, Tejal Shah’s interests lie in the areas of sexuality, gender and consciousness as well as exploring interspecies relationships between ecologies. In 2003, they co-founded Larzish—India’s first international film festival on sexuality and gender plurality. Encompassing experimental video art, photography, performance, drawing, sound and installation, their practice embodies intuitive journeys of the self, alongside intersecting themes of queerness, pleasure and post-pornography. Looking at the installation Between the Waves (2012), this essay attempts to read their work as being publicly and politically sited, layering notions of queerness with non-binary subjectivities.

A five-channel immersive video installation that is accompanied by a series of two-dimensional works, Between the Waves keeps with Shah’s usual thematic foundations of queer sexuality, ecology and the performativity of bodies. It also creates an arena of collaborative, collective making that espouses care, pleasure, humour and love amid the dramaturgy of planetary relationships. Shah’s familiarity with visual histories and representations of the post-pornographic are evident in their construction of sequences. Their characters—fantastical, brimming with mystique, sensuality and yearning—make love, paint tree-stumps, collect plastic, lie in soft embrace and frolic on screen. As a participating artist at dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012, Shah began work on this project in 2011, even though early inclinations had long existed.

The video for the eponymous Channel I unfolds as a fable over five parts with each chapter separated by a Harappan seal marker. Through the rich visuals, we are led across different landscapes—beaches, arid deserts, sinking wetlands with mangroves choked by plastic refuse—populated by “humanimals.” In Channel II, “Landfill Dance,” bodies cloaked in plastic and other synthetics move gingerly through mountains of trash, their choreography hinting at the absurdly humorous in a decaying world. Channel III, titled “Animation” is a stop-motion duo-chromatic video incorporating hand-drawn creatures that burst at the seams, a pile of pubic hair that flits across the screen and spectral beings that hover over sharp waves. “Moon Burning,” as Channel IV, documents the long loop of a crescent moon that turns to ash and resurrects back into a state of integrity over the course of the video. The last channel, “Morse Code,” set across a flat screen references the historical iconicity of the Harappan Seals with their illegibility and undeciphered charm. In a series of rapid flickerings of black and white, it beeps out a set of commissioned poems by Minal Hajratwala.

Speaking of their artistic practice, Shah states that they work slowly, spending a lot of time on each project. This allows them to navigate fragments and constellations of ideas, actions, tones and keywords over directional narrativity. Sound design forms an important part of their work as we see the technological shifts in this installation exacerbate the underlying ambiguities of queerness. Their library of digitally produced sound—created specifically for Between the Waves—both enhances and interrupts the post-human dystopia across the channels. The work resists temporal continuity as Shah employs jump cuts to visibly break any image cohesion that may exist, complicating affect. Bodies and rhythms of breath (poised in tension) are accompanied by a continued reassertion of the potency of the imperfect and a nonconformist feminist subjectivity. There is a free spillage of beauty, violence, eroticisms, archaeologies and detritus across the screens and across the expressivity of non-normative, queer, trans and female bodies.

Born of a poetic misreading of Between the Acts and The Waves—novels by Virginia Woolf—the title for this installation veils multiple connotations of the symbol of the wave as a particle, as combustive, and as all-assimilating. Charaterised by an in-betweenness and the liberating inexpressibility of non-duality, Shah's work depicts the spectre of a world in the throes of ecological crisis through dystopian visuals of garbage heap skylines, sludgy beachscapes and bodies overwhelmed by debris. In tying together these themes, they render their primary insistence for a postcolonial, eco-sensitive ethics of coexistence. The work is a curious mapping of references that accommodates Harappan seals as clue-markers, Rebecca Horn, Frida Kahlo and even David Bohm. Occupying a layered positionality as a South Asian artist, Shah’s adoption of Horn’s creature—Unicorn (1970-72)—as their leitmotif reaches far back into genealogies of performance art and critical renegotiations of gendering love, body and desire.

In Between the Waves, Shah attempts to reconstruct a complex imagination of the post-human through a post-gender lens. They foreground radical concepts of care, love and pleasure as a means of charting an indeterminate future. In destabilising the ideas of the explicit as profane and decay as inevitable, Shah invites viewers to submit to an aspirational consideration: queerness as criticality, anti-coercive, and most importantly, emancipatory. 

All images from Between the Waves by Tejal Shah. 2012. Images courtesy of the artist.