can i see u?
4-channel video installation with sound
2022

Using cut-out images sourced from queer dating apps, ‘can i see u?’ aims to restructure a relation between spaces, objects and time. The audio narration allows us to reconstruct a record of desire moving through non-linear space and time. Cut-out images from dating apps subtract the central figure and bring to focus the background instead. Subtracting the central figure in these photographs allows us to focus on objects in the background, and the interior spaces they sit in, both of which then become the central focus of these images. The audio narration moves between contemporary time and space, interspersed with accounts that became public through the Wolfenden Committee Report of 1957 that came together after the Montagu Trial that involved the arrest of Lord Montagu, Peter Wildeblood and Michael Pitt Rivers on grounds of ‘indecent behaviour’ at Montagu’s beach hut. This committee was a principal document in the decriminalization of homosexuality in the United Kingdom in 1967 and became an important reference in the 2009 Suresh Kumar Koushal v. NAZ Foundation case taking place in the Delhi High Court that led to the decriminalization of homosexuality in Delhi in 2009. The four-channel video is spread out through a large, black space, images flashing in tandem with the text.