Noise: Resistance in Mithila Jariwala’s Images
The process of making images as a form of healing and resilience sometimes results in powerful and disturbing forms, such that the sensorial experience becomes the medium of encountering these works. Mithila Jariwala’s series, Noise (2018–ongoing), offers an illustration of this—where the sound evokes the emotions that drive her intimate image-making practice. A photographer and narrative practitioner, Jariwala created Noise as a response to listening to her body and communicating with it. In her work, confrontation and conversation are visualised with boldness and fragility as she pries open the harsh realities of mental health. By photographing her body, she is able to translate what occupies her mind into more tangible forms of images and sounds.
Jariwala started her career as a travel photographer, but shifted away from focusing on the outside world to her own personal one in 2015. The distraught political scenario of the right-wing Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party coming into power in 2014, leading to a radical escalation of extreme social injustices taking place in India had a major role to play in this shift. In 2019, the artist began to identify with these incidents—particularly the communication isolation of Kashmir from the rest of India—at such a personal level that it heightened the resistance and imbalances she felt in her body. The questions that replayed in her mind created polarised constructs of identity and emotion as well as extreme bouts of inner conflict and struggle.
When Jariwala initially began photographing her body in 2016, it was in order to create visual narrations for her therapist to understand what she was going through. She made self-portraits in bathtubs and isolated spaces, staging her vulnerability as a form of strength. Continuing this process even today, it is the artist’s way of visually responding to the agony and distress that overtakes her mind. This form of personal reflection has led Jariwala to an act of intentional, focused listening which in turn provides the base of strength adopted in the series—tellingly titled Noise.
In 2018, when Jariwala was diagnosed with Tinnitus or a buzzing noise in her ears, the chaos she felt within her turned into a structured sound. Rather than pushing it away, she embraced this new condition as signals and signs to decipher her body. The artist began to recognise and associate specific noises with certain situations. Through this process she recognised her body’s response to conditions of anxiety, helplessness and calm. Referring to these varying noises as a barometer to gauge emotion and the state of her body, the act of listening also became a part of the artist’s healing process. The sounds that pervade Jariwala’s mind vary from constant low hums of white noise, to crickets chirping and the most extreme of all, screeching whistling noises. During a workshop mentored by Antoine D’Agata, Sohrab Hura and Tania Bohórquez at the 2018 Angkor Photo Festival, Jariwala worked with her body every day to visualise her emotions. The sounds in her video work, Noise (2018), created during the workshop, were gathered from open-source sound files of tinnitus on the internet. The sound design of this work translates into a composition of silence and chaos in the artist’s mind through an exploration of moving still images.
With this strong engagement of self-reflection and resilience at the core of her practice, Jariwala resists preconditioned thoughts of the exposure and acceptance of raw emotions and mental health conditions as forms of weakness. The resonance of resistance in her body is backed by a sensitivity structured by the sounds she hears within her head. The artist’s training as a narrative practitioner—at a long-term Mental Health programme centred around Narrative ideas and practices with Ummeed Child Development Center, Mumbai in 2019—reinforced her belief in resilience existing as a condition of strength. The artist refers to the light in her images as a residue of time in her relationship with the mind and body. It is in the shadows formed by this light that a certain freedom exists with an ever-present acceptance of Noise.
All works from the series Noise by Mithila Jariwala. 2018. Images courtesy of the artist.
