skin as feeling vessel
© Adiba Muzaffar 2018

i

skin as feeling vessel
Adiba Muzaffar
			
			
A Thesis Essay submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the
Degree of Master of Fine Arts
in
Visual Arts and Media Arts
			

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART & DESIGN
2018
						
© Adiba Muzaffar 2018

ii

For the camera shy Muzaffars.

table of contents

iii

list of figures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv
recall. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
abstract. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
dis-ease. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
skin (as)
border. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
drape. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
peel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
screen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
collector. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
container. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
visual language. . . . . . . . . . 21
dis-ease. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
feeling vessel. . . . . . . . . . 25
acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
works cited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

list of figures

iv

Fig. 1: Adiba Muzaffar, Skin Studies with Latex, Plaster and Clay. 2017

Page 09

Fig. 2: Adiba Muzaffar, stills from 'Inside Information'. 2016

Page 10

Fig. 3: Adiba Muzaffar, on-shoot still from 'chapterzero:'. 2017

Page 11

Fig. 4: Adiba Muzaffar, stills from 'chapterzero:'. 2017

Page 12

Fig. 5: Adiba Muzaffar, installation view of rotoscopy film 'Skins'. 2016

Page 13

Fig. 6: Adiba Muzaffar, Drying peels (collection), dried peel (portrait). 2017

Page 14

Fig. 7: Adiba Muzaffar, A plaster display holding half a drying peel, a resin orange in
oil paint, a melting sugar glass orange and a ghost orange with oil paint picking up the
texture of an orange skin. 2017

Page 14

Fig. 8: Adiba Muzaffar, a detail of the resin bodied orange, fossilizing a dried peel. 2017

Page 14

Fig. 9: Zoe Leonard, 'Strange Fruit (for David)'. 1992-97.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with funds contributed by the Dietrich
Foundation and with the partial gift of the artist and the Paula Cooper Gallery

Page 15

Fig. 10: Adiba Muzaffar, unedited still from 'chapterzero:'. 2017

Page 16

Fig. 11: Adiba Muzaffar, unedited still from 'Pick a Side'. 2017

Page 16

Fig. 12: Ana Mendieta, Untitled : 'Glass on Body Imprints' - Face. 1972
Gelatin silver prints. Each: 25.4 x 20.3 cm. (10 x 8 in.)
Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund. 2007-41.1-.13.
Photo: Bruce M. White, Location: Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton,
New Jersey, U.S.A., Photo Credit: Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource, NY

Page 17

Fig. 13: Lisa Steele, 'Birthday Suit - with Scars and Defects'. 1974
video transferred to DVD; 13 min. Courtesy of Lisa Steele and Vtape Toronto

Page 19

Fig. 14: Adiba Muzaffar, still from 'Pick a Side'. 2017

Page 20

Fig. 15: Adiba Muzaffar, on-shoot still from 'Dance'. 2018

Page 21

Fig. 16: Adiba Muzaffar, installation view of 'Trial Room'. 2017-18

Page 25

Fig. 17: Adiba Muzaffar, installation view of 'Dance'. 2018

Page 26

recall
We arrive home from school to be informed by
Mumma that there are afternoon plans to be
accommodated alongside homework. We have to
leave the house around 3.30 pm to make it in time
for a majlis1 at the mosque Shah-e-Marda. We
don’t want to be late. Why is Papa not coming? Ask
him that. Find some black clothes and a dupatta2
to cover your head. All this information is never
met with delight or excitement, so Mumma
ensures that nothing about it is up for debate. My
sister changes into the only decently drab kurta3
before I can.
We hail an auto-rickshaw from outside the
campus gate and my mother negotiates with the
driver to agree to a fare of Rs. 40. We arrive at the
mosque within 20 minutes. What first meets the
eye is a dusty patch of land, which in the evenings
serves as a busy parking lot. We cross it on foot,
and as if on cue, we become collectively solemn.
We are late, so we rush to the back entrance of
the main chamber of the mosque, familiar with
the fact that that’s where the women congregate.
Stepping over a mass of shoes and slippers, we
make it inside, recognizing the faces of distant
relatives in the crowd despite their hooded heads.
The seating is essentially a carpeted floor, which
makes those who arrive first pick the spots that
allow leaning against a wall, or a pillar. This leaves
a bald patch in the center of the room, free for
movement. But more women trickle in soon
enough and claim it all. Greetings are exchanged,

v

quietly, before the majlis begins. The floor is
covered in cotton bed sheets over the carpeting,
some of which have prints. One of them has the
audacity of a floral pattern. Clearly the rules of
mourning do not apply to this functional piece of
decor. Nobody in the room is wearing colors other
than black, white, gray and shades of blue. And
there is little jewelery worn except for rings and
religious pendants. There are women who have
replaced their nose-pins with a piece of string or a
twig from a neem plant.

of being able to switch between the two positions,
as holding one for too long can be numbing.
Some young kids begin to fall asleep as the fazail
(recital) progresses but I know that with my height
I outgrew that luxury. I have a clear image of my
mother’s special frown for when I try to rest my
head on her shoulder and suggest passing out.

The Zakir (speaker) clears his throat to declare
himself ready to start. The room falls silent. He
is on the other side of a curtain that separates
us women from the men in attendance. He
introduces himself using a microphone, from the
men’s side of the chamber where we know he’s
seated in a high chair that is also cloaked in black
fabric. He announces the name of the hosting
family who have graciously invited us all this
afternoon. Naare-Salawat4. Allahumma salli ‘ala
Muhammadin wa Aali Muhammad. And thus
begins a narration. One that I do not follow.

The space has now run out of wiggle room and
reached full capacity. I find myself having only
retained enough space to hold the knee-hugging
position. Trapped in that shrunken state, I try to
be motionless even though I’d really like to erupt,
burst, spill, leak, dissipate. The narrative of the
Battle of Karbala5 builds up and turns morose in
a matter of minutes. This triggers small sobs as a
first reaction until one of the women from around
us breaks down to cause a ripple effect. The crying
becomes a wail, the wails become a song. I am
not crying, just hiding. And I don’t understand
why everyone else is. At some point I look up and
meet my sister’s searching eyes. This marks the
moment for escape.

I am uncomfortable. Most women shift back and
forth between a sitting position where they can
hug their knees and rest their heads down, or they
sit cross-legged. The former works better as you
can be incognito, or in my case pretend-awake.
Actually, let’s be honest here, I mean pretendmourning. I try to settle in keeping the possibility

Is falling asleep during a majlis considered
disrespectful or is it that the sprawled, sleeping
body looks kind of shameless?

vi

The first month of the Islamic calendar, namely
Muharram, is observed as a period of mourning
in which Muslims remind themselves of the death
of Imam Hussein and his family during the Battle
of Karbala. A great deal of respect is reserved for
the sacrifice of the martyrs who were the first
followers and propagators of Islamic ideology. By
praying in abundance and refraining from joyous
events, symbols and actions they revisit the
historical facts considered crucial to the flourish
of Islam.

Majlis is an Arabic term meaning "a place of sitting", used in the
context of "council", to describe various types of special gatherings
among common interest groups be it administrative, social or
religious in countries with linguistic or cultural connections to
Islam. It shares its root with the verb meaning 'to sit,' (cf. British
English 'sitting room'). Among the Shia community the term
majlis is used as a verb meaning to the gathering who came to
remember Ahl al-Bayt and in particular Hussain ibn-e-Ali.
1

A length of material worn as a scarf or head covering, typically
with a salwar, by women from South Asia.
2

A kurta is a long uni-sex upper garment that is worn in
conservative and culturally appropriated and traditional settings.
3

Salawat is a special Arabic phrase, which contains the salutation
upon the prophet of Islam. This kind of phrase is usually expressed
by Muslims in their five daily prayers (during the Tashahhud) and
also when the name of Muhammad had been mentioned.
4

The Battle of Karbala took place on Muharram 10, in the year 61
AH of the Islamic calendar (October 10, 680 AD) in Karbala, in
present-day Iraq. The battle took place between a small group of
supporters and relatives of Muhammad's grandson, Husayn ibn
Ali, and a larger military detachment from the forces of Yazid I,
the Umayyad caliph.
5

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abstract
This paper is the textual component for an ongoing visual
arts MFA graduate thesis at Emily Carr University of Art
and Design (Vancouver, BC). The document is structured
to take up ideas around discomfort for the female body,
through a phenomenological analysis of human skin as a
feeling vessel. The media and installation work produced
alongside this thesis is a cinematic visual inquiry to pose
the question: where is feeling found?
Socio-cultural, linguistic and psychological spaces
are activated in a manner of thinking such that skin
gets read as a border, drape, peel, screen, collector and
container for feelings of discomfort, or dis-ease. As the
chosen medium for this inquiry is the moving image, the
thesis hones in on the ability of transference that filmas-body is capable of triggering. To locate subjectively
internalized manifestations of dis-ease via the experience
of embodiment is the broad ambition of the work.

viii

dis.ease
‘dis-ease’ or the lack of ease, in this recasting of the word,
refers to any or all synonyms of bodily discomfort.
The uneasiness of pathological disease is described in
oppositional terms - unhealthy,
				
unwell,
					
unsound;

dis-ease could be understood as a common denominator
for each of these states.
Restlessness, anxiety, malaise, irritability, constriction,
awkwardness, guilt, shame and humiliation are feelings or
configurations of dis-ease that prolong bodily discomfort
beyond physical pain among other medically diagnosable
symptoms.

skin (as) border
Where are we to put the limit between the body and the
world, since the world is flesh? 6

In the unfinished manuscript The Visible and the
Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty questions ways
in which the body places itself in relation to the
world. While asking what might be the limit
between the two, he deems the world itself to
be flesh. Is flesh then a limit or is it how the
body extends itself to experience? David Abram
explains Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘flesh’ as “the
mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and
gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived
as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous
activity”. 7 Flesh could quite simply be gleaned
here as an intermediary between the physicality
of the world and the sensorial stimulation that it
initiates for the immersed body.
Merleau-Ponty coined the term “primacy of
perception” 8 which refers to how we perceive
the world through our bodies, as embodied
subjects involved in existence. I am interested in
further speculating the body to pursue my own
interest, in locating feeling. The body comes
to be understood through several symbolic
interpretations, but I approach it as a feeling
vessel with an internal and external reception
of experience, fluctuating between 'ease' and
'dis-ease'. To develop a visual language for this
inquiry, I have initiated a tactile dialogue with
skin such that simple brushes against other skins

9

begin to visually suggest the gestural manners
of the talking and listening body. Using fruit
skins (see Fig. 1) for instance, has been one
methodological approach of thinking about flesh
and skin in the performance of feeling. With
such material explorations I hope to navigate the
invisibility of dis-ease within the bordered body.
While Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of flesh
pushes the body outwards in order for it to
perceive the world, Joanna Robinson invests in
a perspective of the bodily surface, as it erodes
away in light of malignancy. In her essay Skin
Deep 9, she recounts the lived memory of her
father’s skin cancer treatment and grants skin an
urgent, poetic agency. As her father fragments
and withers before her eyes, she writes a piece of
nonfiction from his bedside which reads skin as
an encasement. She conjures unnerving images
of an infirm body at the accepting end of a
slow, glorious torture. While bearing witness
to a regrowing body as new cells ‘rise and mesh’
together, Robinson tributes skin in its state of
re-emergence (2). Early in the essay she takes up
skin as a territorial border for the body:
Of all borders, none feels as fundamental as our skin.
Defined by skin, we are defined territories, portable
countries. The solid, soft and liquid of us are contained and
identified; we do not spill, or leave parts of ourselves here
and there, or mix up our own being with other substances
in the world. Skin makes us separate and sovereign. (1)

Fig. 1: Using latex, polymer clay and plaster moulds to pick up
the textural details of the skin of fruit was the first step towards
thinking about the significations around skin in 2017. Adiba
Muzaffar.
6
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Claude Lefort. ‘The Visible and the
Invisible Followed by Working Notes’. W. Ross MacDonald School
Resource Services Library. 2011. pp.138.
Abram, David. ‘The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and
Language in a More-than Human World’. Pantheon Books, New
York. 1996. pp. 66.
7

Merleau Ponty, Maurice, and Colin Smith. ‘Phenomenology of
Perception’. International Library of Philosophy and Scientific
Method. 1962.
8

Robinson, Joanna. ‘Skin Deep’. River Teeth: A Journal of
Nonfiction Narrative 9(1), 36-41. Ashland University. Project
MUSE database. 2007. pp. 1-3
9

10

Skin is indeed what keeps the inner-self safely
hidden as much as it makes each individual
recognizable from the outside. For this dual
function skin qualifies as a border. But I wouldn’t
confuse it for a boundary or an end limit. An
atmospheric sense organ, skin grows with the
person and absorbs information to enable the
personal. The body is immersed in a thicket of
stimulation with the flesh of the world aligning
itself along the flesh of the body, sometimes even
impelling to permeate it. A small cut tearing our
epidermis bleeds and scabs at the point of injury,
but when we’re cut open, the pain quakes through
the feeling vessel.
To be factually accurate, this is a play of nerve
endings. But even vivid imagery positioned on
skin is successful in triggering a wince of pain.
Skin responds to shifts in the air around itself,
reacting to even the most minimal sort of attack
on personal space. It has an ability to sense, feel,
absorb and contain feeling. Bordered by it, the
body becomes an entrapment that is packed,
pickled, smothered, drenched and fizzling with
feeling.
Scars, burns and racial markers also draw along the
same border, laying bare one’s history or cultural
identity in a language of marks and shades. Such
signifiers when attached to skin make it a
differentiating border. Identity hinges upon
such differentiation. Ideas of belonging and

ownership through sociocultural or political
engagements of the body can come to cause
discomfort in the metaphysical assertions of
the self. I’ve recognized skin as the locus above
and beneath which this discomfort can be found
lurking. This project is a culminated interest in
capturing varied experiences of discomfort held
as bodily memories on camera, by thinking about
isolated attributes of skin through its material,
visual language. A metaphorical reading of
skin ensues (see Fig. 2) as the gathered personal
accounts use skin as a witness, spokesperson, and
performer of authentic experiences of dis-ease.
In summoning the conflicting binaries between
which skin operates : two fold readings that
range common knowledge, cultural language and
phenomenology, I situate my thesis inquiry. The
media installation film work peruses the feeling
of discomfort using skin as a flattening basic to
talk about the dis-eased state of the body. Skin
allows a variety of associations to settle around
itself that range from ordinary, to evocative and
troubling. Is the bodily experience of comfort
and discomfort universal? Are we in possession of
skin, or possessed by it? What is skin if we’re held
prisoner under its expanse? And what are we,
without it?

Fig. 2: Stills from'Inside Information' (2016). Adiba Muzaffar.
Experiments with textures to think about the skin as the border, of
the body as the site for dis-ease.

skin (as) drape
In the controversial book, 'Intercourse (1987)',
by radical feminist and writer Andrea Dworkin
skin is what assigns the “first clue to identity in
a society” 10. By wearing a “thin veil of matter10
separating the outside from the inside” we are
wrapped in a “human mask” (32). Despite the
coverage that comes with skin, one calls this
the 'bare body'. The raw honesty thus attributed
to this bare body makes the 'human mask' not
a mere facade, but a shelter to further protect.
Civilization has taught this body a thing or two
about vulnerability by conditioning it to escape
the strains of visibility (see Fig. 3).
Dworkin writes about ‘first nakedness’ (33) and
how the innocence and basic nature of it as a
primary state is unrecoverable. Skin comes to
learn its social functions as it gets covered in layers
of “social self” assimilating “emotional pains,
rituals and rules that are antithetical to any pure
experience of being” (28). She also remarks on how
re-draping the natural drape of skin, as suggested
by social conformity and convention, causes a
slow loss of the knowledge that the primal, naked
body brought with itself. The factor of visibility
enables a psychic or behavioral function for skin,
inaugurating the “basis for corporeal privacy”
(27). Beneath this drape is where the formation
of the self is intended to begin. Judith Butler11
in 'Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (1990)' talks about
identity-differentiation to bring up a spatial

11

distinction between the “inner” and the “outer”
being. So when I say that my experience of the
body is female, it implies that the “internal fixity
of the self" (Butler 134) has been determined and
then embodied. Butler has famously challenged
such an internalization- “If the inner world
no longer designates a topos, then the internal
fixity of the self and, indeed, the internal locale
of gender identity, become similarly suspect”.
She asks, “How does a body figure on its surface
the very invisibility of its hidden depth?”. Which
makes me ask- How does my body come to abide
by codes of conduct that root for a performance
called 'female'?
Reading skin as a drape is my manner of dealing
with my body's dis-ease around visibility. That
my skin is what others don’t need to see and
so must be covered up, was a key instruction
that manifested and vexed me in my early
understanding of being a female-bodied Muslim.
In being covered, I was taught to avoid drawing
attention to my body. My mother would quote
forewarnings from the Holy Book of Quran about
how on the Day of Judgement (Qayamat) “your
ears and your eyes and your skin would testify
against you if you have not been hiding yourselves
(in the world)” 12. Besides learning to be harmless
and invisible my body was also learning to become
that of a woman. The expectation of the female
body, as I gauged, was that it should know how to
celebrate and decorate itself as much as it should

Fig. 3: On shoot still from the set of 'chapterzero:' - the female
body restricted by societal and beauty demands to both hide and
reveal itself.
Dworkin, Andrea. "Skinless", 'Intercourse'. 2007 ed. Basic Books.
1987. pp. 26-33
10

Butler, Judith. 'Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity'. Routledge. 1990. pp. 134
11

“The disbeliever or the hypocrite will be called in front of the
Lord and will be shown his own deeds, but he will deny them and
say, ‘O Lord, by your glory, this angel has written about me something that I did not do.’ The angel will say to him, ‘Did you not do
such and such on such and such a day in such and such a place’ He
will say, ‘No, by your glory O Lord, I did not do it.’ When he does
that, a seal will be placed over his mouth.”
http://www.qtafsir.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2126
12

12

know how to hide. When you are constantly
remarked upon and reminded to keep in check
the restraints that apply to your body, you are
being followed under the guise of being looked
after. And so I found myself looking at a crudely
cropped image of myself in the making with
several owners of my body, of my physical, visible
self 13.
In my film ‘chapterzero: (2017) ’ I take up the idea
of draping the body fetching from my femalebodied experience, in attempt to visualize shame.
To not ‘expose’ the body or wear ‘revealing’
clothes are suggestions that many women in
India encounter, such that shame is directly and
indirectly projected at them creating a sense
of difference within the operating cisgendered
norms.
Using nylon pantyhose (sheer hosiery), an object of
fetish more than function, I re-draped the skin of
a female-bodied artist who works with limitations
on the body. The captured moving image was
essentially a set of hands fighting against the nylon,
as if to dismiss it. There is no motivated action to
the movement of the hands. The image blurs in
and out of focus, with the nylon snapping back at
the body despite being aggressively rejected. The
text in the film tries to recall the disruption of my
“young, unconscious” uninhibited self. Shame
roots an individual to cultural or belonging-based
expectations , and so can take shape in a variety

of ways- but that it has a physical and psychological
impact on the body is what I wanted to explore.
The use of nylon pantyhose also references the
ridiculous norms and expectations of beauty and
modesty projected on the body to shroud its spirit
and character (see Fig. 4).
In 'The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004)' Sara
Ahmed 14 mentions that when one is shamed
their body “seems to burn up with the negation
that is perceived (self-negation); and shame [then]
impresses upon the skin as an intense feeling of
the subject being against itself” (103). Shame
certainly involves an impulse to 'take cover' and
to 'cover oneself'. But the desire to cover and to
be covered presupposes the failure of cover. In
shame, one desires to cover precisely because
they have been exposed to others. Hence the word
shame is associated as much with cover and
concealment, as it is with exposure, vulnerability
and wounding (Lynd 1958; Wurmser 1981). That
the invisible nature of shame can provoke the
body to feel such strong impulses to hide, points
again to the permeability that skin as a border
allows in a navigation of the self through the
environment and the (disapproving) other.

Fig. 4: Film still from 'chapterzero: (2017) '. Adiba Muzaffar.
This chapter may have raised an expectation for the hijaab (or
the veil) because of how the word drape is read in the cultural
context I bring up. I’d like to make it clear though that I did not
grow up covering my head outside of religious contexts (such as
the described setting of a majlis).
13

Ahmed, Sara. 'The Cultural Politics of Emotion'. Routledge,
2014. pp. 103
14

skin (as) peel
‘Skins (2017)’ was a work I produced as a part of
Widely Construed, the MFA Interim Exhibition
at Emily Carr University’s Abraham J. Rogatnick
Media Gallery. The work was an explication
of bodily anxiety as I began to seek out acts of
discomfort in everyday rituals. In wanting to
unpack the aspect of control true to disordered
eating, I came to recognize fruit as a metaphor
for the body. I first invited people to my studio
and requested them to cut fruit for me and my
camera. Next, I used the clips I’d filmed and some
others that I found online as references to make a
rotoscoped15 animation film (see Fig. 5).
Playing up the uncanny, twitchy movements
made the form of the fruit bodies retain their
familiarity and their symbolic seduction, despite
being stripped of the colors and the textural
details. The image was essentially black outlines
of the fruit and of the hands - or it can be said - just
their skins. The fruit would get cut and peeled but
there’d never be any eating as the film would leap
from the last frame to the first, with an un-peeled
fruit coming wholly back in sight again.
The restated action of undressing gradually
began to insist upon a recursive implication of
vulnerability. The hands ruled over the fruit as
it kept giving away. The animated image also
reduced the threshold of pressure and intensity
realistically required to lacerate the fruit. The
fruit body would forgo all claims of safety with

13

the skin accepting its permeability- a habitat
failing to be protective in light of violence. The
film was displayed as a two-sided projection, over
a circular piece of vinyl affixed on a glass wall.
I continued to look for ways in which I can create
a language about the human body through the
body of fruit, post this experiment. I wanted
to personify fruit and bring it to enact human
tendencies. So, as a next step, I decided to peel
a bulk of real oranges, an observation exercise
meant to see ways in which body metaphors could
be positioned around skin. To speed up the process
of drying the peels, I was advised to free them of
all the pith (or albedo) and just let them sit. This
let me arrive at an unseen, fragmented state of
the skins where the dimpled orange peel revealed
a stippling-like smattering of little craters on its
hidden underside. At first, these skins were limp
and flat, just enjoying the warmth in the studio.
But with a slow loss of moisture, each piece lifted
itself up to bulge outwards, with the orange face
caving in.
As I set out with no specific expectation,
witnessing the drying peels not as discards or
dead organs but as residue with life left in them
felt valuable enough as an end outcome. It was
like a chance encounter of a spirited celebration,
a post-retirement ripening! I saw this as an
oddly satisfying encounter with ease. To be at
ease, as suggested before, is opposed to dis-ease

Fig. 5: Installation view of 'Skins (2017)' . Adiba Muzaffar.
Rotoscoping is a method where tracing over video footage frame
by frame permits an uncanny remake of the moving image.
15

14

and synonymous to freedom. And the freedom
that I have chanced upon in my own personal
experience has been the freedom in departure.

disturbing, but it again spoke to my own struggle
with freedom- something I’ve been led to believe
is given, not taken (see Fig. 6-8).

In Two Concepts of Liberty 16, a famous essay
first published in 1958, Isaiah Berlin brings up
the negative concept of freedom or liberty in
attempting to answer the question “What is the
area within which a person or group of persons
should be left to do, or be what he is able to be,
without interference by other persons?”. On the
contrary, the positive concept can be understood
in attempting to answer the question “What, or
who, is the source of control or interference that
can determine someone to do, or be, this rather
than that?”(1969, pp. 121–122). The difference
between the two concepts can be gauged in terms
of the difference between factors that are external
and internal to the agent. In my feeble assertions
of freedom, I’ve had to leave whatever grounds me
- be it a city, a community or any form of loyalty to feel free of religious and societal expectations.
This could be why I found myself eager to honor
the agency that the drying peels were claiming.

In the last chapter, I spoke about the covered body
and the obstructed sense of self beneath it, so am I
now suggesting the peeling off of such restraints
as a solution? Human skin doesn't come off that
easy, but there is indeed a metaphorical discourse
on 'skinlessness'. Andrea Dworkin, among others,
has written about the female body as skinless.
She explains the ‘skinless woman’ as one without
‘internal life’, ‘human resonance’ or a need for
‘human interpretation’. She speaks of it as ‘a
body without dimension’ given how it is “painted
pink, photographed, embalmed and then killed”
(Dworkin 9)17. For Dworkin, skinlessness is the
lack of something to probe, making the female
form depthless, inferior and therefore fictional.
Claudia Benthien18, in her book 'Skin: The
Cultural Border between the Self and the World
(2002)', brings up her interpretation of skinless by
comparing ‘the skinless man’ who “traditionally
presents a positive image of liberation” to “the
skinless woman” who “is taboo” (83-90).

I decided to make silicone-molds to be able to pick
up the shape and texture of the skin of oranges to
cast the drying peels in clear resin, giving them
translucent orange-shaped bodies. While this
fossilized form was meant to privilege the dried
peel as a thing of beauty, I realized that I was also
holding it captive. The irony in this duality is

An interesting instance of this gender-based
anomaly within the notion of skinlessness, can be
found in the film 'Silence of the Lambs (1991)' 19.
The primary transsexual antagonist- Bufallo Billis found murdering and skinning women to make

Fig. 6

Fig. 7

Fig. 8
Fig. 6 - Drying peels (collection), dried peel (portrait)
Fig. 7 - A plaster display holding half a drying peel, a resin orange
in oil paint, a melting sugar glass orange and a ghost orange with
oil paint picking up the texture of an orange skin (made as a mold/
display case)
Fig. 8 - A detail of the resin bodied orange, fossilizing a dried peel.
Berlin, Isaiah, 1969, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in I. Berlin, Four
Essays on Liberty, London: Oxford University Press. New ed. in
Berlin, 2002. pp. 121-122
17
Dworkin, Andrea. "Repulsion", 'Intercourse'. 2007 ed. Basic
Books. 1987. pp. 9
18
Benthien Claudia. 'Skin: The Cultural Border Between the Self
and the World'. Columbia Univ. Press, 2002. pp. 83-90.
19
Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Orion Pictures.
1991
16

15

a woman suit for himself, as he has been denied
a sex change operation. Benthien points out
through this example how the “profane” purpose
of wanting to possess skin, for its “essence of
femaleness” is how Buffalo Bill too holds up the
old attribution of the woman as a “beautiful
smooth outer surface enclosing nothing but
hollow space” (93).
It would be wrong to take up so many notions
around the dis-eased body and not touch upon
death. When I came across Zoe Leonard’s work
titled Strange Fruit (for David) I was deeply
moved by her use of fruit to reflect upon the loss
of lives due to the AIDS epidemic. In this work
Leonard does away with the meat of several
kinds of fruits to restitch the disfigured forms of
their rind. As the work was also made in reaction
to Billie Holiday’s song Strange Fruit and the
death of a close friend, Leonard chose it “as a
way to sew her[self] back up”20. Using zippers,
buttons and wire she was able to contain the pain
of coping with death, in the created void that
was once a swell, live form. I thought it to be a
rather arresting meditation on mourning. In this
acknowledgment of the bodies as shrines in
themselves, the skins were rewarded a personage
(see Fig. 9 & 10).
Such a posthumous celebration of a body bearing
trauma compels me to think about the manner
in which my semi-religious upbringing has been

insistent upon the body becoming a site for
grief, restraint and punishment. In the
introductory chapter titled 'recall ' I try to build
a scene where many kinds of disengagement
with my immediate context are at play, leading
to a heightened engagement with the feeling of
discomfort. Attending these religious events
was clearly fruitless, if this discomfort is
the key take away I report. Islam, in my liberal
experience, as a religious institution regards
sacrifice and mourning to a degree that leaves
little room for notions of healing to strike a fair
balance. As a child, and one who has witnessed the
scene that I describe, I would find myself silenced
by my discomfort, while those around me would
successfully mourn as per the demand.

Image removed due to copyright
restrictions.

Fig. 9

Fig. 9: Zoe Leonard's 'Strange Fruit (for David) ' . 1992-97.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with funds contributed
by the Dietrich Foundation and with the partial gift of the artist
and the Paula Cooper Gallery, 1998, 1998-2-1
https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/92277.
html
Zoe Leonard in an interview with the artist by Anna Blume,
January 18, 1997, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
20

skin (as) screen
As the edge between the body and the world, the skin
functions always as both a covering and an uncovering
because of its simultaneous proximity to the public world
and to the secretive inner body. It covers the body’s secrets
by clothing us in a placid smoothness that hides the murky
movements within. 21

In The Tactile Eye, Jennifer M. Barker assumes
some poetic liberty while describing the skin of
the body in relation to the skin of the film. She
continues, though, to speak about this surface
beneath which one hides to also be where their
secrets get relayed such that “we are always naked
in it” (Barker 28). Barker proposes that like the
human body, the film has a skin, a viscera and
a musculature. To explain the relationship that
the film-body is able to initiate with human skin,
she quotes Laura Marks22 who calls the contact
initiated between film and viewer, a caress or an
“erotic embrace” (Barker 35-36).
Marks recognizes this caress as a kind of ‘union’
which “does not obliterate the self so much as
fray its boundaries” (24) . The screen to screen
contact initiated by the moving image is known
to immerse and move the viewer. While the “basis
of touching is reaching out, it also implies the
reverse being touched in return. This reciprocal
condition can be extended to a representational
object as well. Indeed, it invests the very process
of film reception” (Barker 33). This possibility
of a tangible sensation without any touch being
physically initiated is a challenge I want to work

16

with. Kaja Silverman23 in The Threshold of the
Visible World calls the ‘normative aspects’ of the
screen to be “so deeply rooted within our psyches
and so tightly imbricated with our desires and
identifications, that they generally determine
what we see at the first moment of looking at
a particular object”. What she calls the ‘screen’
although is the “full range of representational
coordinates available at a particular moment”
that propose themselves with an inevitability that
they are “given to be seen” (Silverman 221). She
brings up the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman to
describe nuanced ways in which the female body
has learnt to frame itself in a two dimensional
universe that is given to be seen and operates in an
oversimplified kind of sensuality.

		
		
		

screen
: conceal , hide, veil
screen
: show, broadcast, transmit

The word 'screen' is tricky, though. Looking at
it as only one of two things - a cover or a display
- is problematic. In the worlds we create for the
purposes of film, we build a notion of comfort for
the film subject so that they are able to perform.
This cover is later lifted. Such a play with screens
is especially true for the female bodied performer
as the games of hiding and revealing at play are as
sensationalizing as they are reductive.

Fig. 10

Fig. 11
Fig. 10: Unedited stills from 'chapterzero:' (2017)
Canon 5D Mark III, 100mm, pantyhose
Fig. 11: Unedited stills from 'Pick a Side' (2017)
Canon 5D Mark III, 100mm, latex, leather
Barker, Jennifer M. 'The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic
Experience'. University of California Press, 2009. pp. 28-35
21

Marks, Laura U. 'Video Haptics and Erotics'. Screen 39, no.4,
1998: 338 n. pp. 24.
22

Silverman, Kaja. 'The Threshold of the Visible World'. Routledge
New York, 1996. pp. 221
23

17

Edna woke up one morning to realize that she was wearing.
Wearing what? Simply wearing. When she lifted her arms
from the pillow, they shed their color in clouds of powder on
the stif linen. And instead of the daily imprint of the creases
on her cheek, the fragile network of her veins was etched on
the pillowcase. Her skin exchanged surfaces with the ease of
gold foil. Yet, there was nothing horrifying about it, only a
strangeness that can only be felt in wearing painlessly like
she was. 24

In the imagery that Tewari conjures, skin frees
itself and dissipates to leave the body unbound.
Which of them is free though- the body or this
evaporating skin? Factually speaking, the body
cannot withstand such a state as, in just a matter
of minutes, there would be enough blood lost
and germs ingested for all life functions to cease.
But let’s leave reality behind again and claim this
freedom in departure. I’ve been keen on building
upon an absurd fiction; following the
character arc of this fleeing, freeing skin.
Inquiries around the body such as ‘Corps Étranger
(1994)’ by Mona Hatoum, ‘Birthday Suit with
Scars and Defects (1974)’ by Lisa Steele and several
‘Earth-Body Works (1972-85)’ by Ana Mendieta
are prime examples of the recorded body in an
in-between space, which is neither fiction nor
nonfiction. I am beginning to recognize this as the
space from where my own films are materializing.
The flattened image created by the camera can
make the screen of the body become the skin of the
film. Such a blurring or fusion has been attempted

in several ways within the discipline of videoperformance.
In Mendieta’s work ‘Glass on Body Imprints
(1972)’ 25, Mendieta flattens her own body
surface to create two-dimensional instances
of female flesh and form. This, by the simple
act of pressing herself against a piece of glass.
With a disturbing allure in its call, each image
brings her body intimately close to the camera,
to the viewer and to itself. She disrupts the
traditional representation of the female form,
or what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’
(see Fig. 12).
This act of distorting the female form with a glass
screen is extremely evocative for how it challenges
the polite distance maintained by the eye and
glass screen of the camera lens. Her work has a
stark quality of being able to speak of boundaries
and limitations using temporal gestures, space
and materiality. This work has inspired a video
performance for which I have been documenting
my own body, as I take naps on a small glasstop table (I talk more about it in a later chapter).
Ideas around what the body can do to discomfort
the viewer in order to deny them their general
expectation or comfort, or that of beauty has been
strongly prompted in the body based performance
works of Mendieta.

Fig. 12
Fig. 12: Untitled, Glass on Body Imprints - Face (1972).
Ana Mendieta.
Tewari Malvika. 'A Simple Pendulum' (unpublished fragment).
Email to Author, 2013
24

Mendieta, Ana. Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints- Face) 1972.
Purchased usage rights from Art Resource, NY. ART#446539
Credit:Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource, NY
Description: Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints - Face) 1972.
Gelatin silver prints.
Each: 25.4 x 20.3 cm. (10 x 8 in.). Museum purchase, Fowler
McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund. 2007-41.1-.13.
Photo: Bruce M. White
Artist: Mendieta, Ana (1948-1985)
© Copyright Location Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.A. © Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection,
Courtesy Galerie LeLong
25

skin (as) collector
In Claudia Benthien’s document on skin there
is an insistence that skin is both a “projection
surface and a bearer of signs” (12). I started this
thesis document by looking at skin as a border and
at the receiving end of the world at large. But it is
also important to ask what it truly receives and
enfolds or holds on to with its sense of memory.

instances in contemporary writing, only to find
the symbolic value of skin wane and just become
an “expanse of dead cells and nerve endings”.
Briscoe finds that skin is no longer regarded as a
“mood-mirror” (par. 4)27 . This shift in language
illustrates a retraction in the concept of the self to
one with a less embodied impression.

Benthien26 borrows, as examples, metaphors
found in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s original
German from 17th century literature, some of
which are closely inspective of the body by way
of imposing social expectations on it. “Das alles
derb an eigner Haut erfahren” literally reads
“[that] which they experience harshly on their
skin”. “Seine Haut selbst zu Market tragen” or
taking one’s own skin to the market meant “doing
something at your own risk” (or through hard
experience). Similarly “jemandem die Haut voll
schlagen” translates to “giving someone a sound
thrashing” and “ihm recht auf die Haut greifen”
goes on to “really lay a lesson into the skin”. Non
mutilating corporal punishments too involved
skin and hair (“mit Haut und Haar”) where the
scourging and cutting of hair was practiced to
damage the surface of the body, stopping short
at destroying its integrity and leaving basic
functions untouched (Benthien 19). There are
clear manifestations of a grounded, ideal self in
the way that these troubling metaphors all punish
the skin. Joanna Briscoe in her review of Benthien’s
arguments attempts to locate such literary

Merleau-Ponty28 wrote, “I am always on the
same side of my body” in the 'Phenomenology
of Perception (1962)' which I interpret implies
the beginning world at the end of our skin. While
there is contact and intertwining with one’s own
body and with the bodies of others, there is never
a collapse or dissolution of the outline that is skin.
Touch and interaction with the outside world
makes skin develop memory. While looking
at skin as a receptor, or in more modern terms
as an interface I came across Steven Connor’s29
'Thinking Through Skin (2001)' where he takes
up skin as “a soft clock” (46) one that marks the
body temporally.
The marks that we collect on the body serve as
evidence or consequences of our experiences
of embodiment. While some have a temporary
effect, others have an effect that can become
permanent to the sense of self. With piercings,
body art, surgical interventions and tattoos the
body gets marked in deliberated acts of acceptance
of permanence- in, for and with the body.

18

Benthien, Claudia, and Thomas Dunlap. 'Skin: On the Cultural
Border between Self and the World.' Columbia Univ. Press, 2002.
pp. 19
26

Briscoe, Joanna. ‘Skin Deep’: Joanna Briscoe explains the
significance of our surfaces, as explored by Claudia Benthien.
2003. par. 5
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/25/society
27

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. ‘The Primacy of Perception’,
Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 3.
28

Connor, Steven. “Mortification,” ‘Thinking Through the Skin’,
eds. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (New York:
Routledge, 2001, pp. 46
29

19

Heidi Kellet30 in her thesis on skin critiques Lisa
Steele’s video-performance ‘Birthday Suit - with
Scars and Defects (1974)’ 31 which is a collection
of notes on skin's indelibility. In this 13 minute,
black and white video-art piece by the Canadian
artist we hear a narration of the events behind the
many scars and marks on her 27 year old body.
Kellet argues that “different types of epidermal
marks are abundant in all of our epidermal lives”
but “Steele’s inability to address the ways her skin
is marked continually on an almost imperceptible
level illuminates the fact that collectively we
are more concerned with the skin’s ability to
regenerate [or] to heal itself from unsightly
marks, rather than its ability to generate [those]
marks” (20).
Her argument resonates with an experience I
had, not long ago, when the most concerning
aspect of a surgery I was preparing towards were
the marks that it would leave behind. Accepting
the permanence of marks becomes somehow a
matter of accepting being blemished or damaged.
The unique function of skin as it “generates” an
individualistic identity for the body is given little
value. Trauma borne by the body at the skin level
is a subjective, maybe even mundane experience
that gives our bodies unique markings that code
specific memories of pain. The experience of skin
holding the physical trace as evidence of these
events, the details of which fade in the mental
trace of the same, is when it speaks to a human

With such hard evidence marking the body, one
willingly or unwillingly re-accesses bodily pain
or shock once endured, and like that fetches
from past memories that are coded as embodied
experiences. The skin makes room for these
indentations as if to characterize its landscape
and earn a validity through these landmarks and
milestones of having moved experientially across
space and time.

Fig. 13
Fig. 13: 'Birthday Suit - with Scars and Defects, 1974 video transferred to DVD; 13 min. Courtesy of Lisa Steele and Vtape Toronto.
Kellet , Heidi, ‘Skin Portraiture: Embodied Representations in
Contemporary Art’. Electronic Thesis and
Dissertation Repository. 4567. 2017. pp. 20 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/
etd/4567
30

Steele, Lisa. ‘Birthday Suit - with Scars and Defects’. The CCCA
Canadian Art Database. 1974.
http://ccca.concordia.ca/artists/media_detail.html?languagePref=en&mkey=53709&link_id=264
31

skin (as) container
From where does feeling surge and emerge? Where does it
lodge, when it lasts? What becomes of it when it festers?

In Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy
there is an exemplary description of the self as
skin;“That's why I sold the Emperor my hide / So
I'd have no more worries and cares to abide” (16).
This kind of giving over of skin is both an act of
evincing honesty and affirming freedom. In a
physical manner of speaking, this is suggestive
of an extrication from a kind of containment.
Such a containment within skin, with the way it
closes the self in and creates a room where “the
ego is decided” 33 (Serres 17) is then suggestive of a
feeling-self demanding isolation.
32

In the work ‘Pick a Side (2017)’, I was working
with guilt as a contained feeling. I incorporated
text with a moving image of fingers, probing the
corner of a wound-like patch, under a piece of still
curing latex. The suggestion of guilt as something
that alternates between a semi-dry and semi-wet
state, given its gnawing nature, was what I was
hoping to communicate. I wanted to reference the
feeling of picking a drying scab, but by imagining
it on the inside of the body, and on the underside
of the skin. The film starts with the words ‘there’s
room for slippage’ to suggest the manner in which
a committed mistake hardens and liquefies at the
beck and call of a guilty memory. With the refrain
‘there’s room’ the film concludes that this room is

20

only big enough for one “to hide” and “not to run”.
Now guilt is heavy. And I will take the liberty
here to assume that to be its form of occurrence,
universally. Donald L. Carveth34, a registered
Psychotherapist and a professor at York
University cites from Sigmund Freud’s
Civilization and Discontent(1930) the “three
options by which civilized order may be restored
for sufferers of guilt” -namely repression,
suppression and sublimation. Carveth explains
how “most of us do not possess the strength of
character for conscious suppression and selfmastery without self-deception” and “lack the
talent for much sublimation”. He adds that “the
majority will be forced to fall back on repression,
with the disguised return of the [original feeling
of being] repressed that this inevitably entails”
(Section I par. 1) . He brings up forms of selfpunishment that the resulting “retroflected
aggression” brings and how it can result in causing
long-term damage to the ego.
Later in the same text, he puts it quite simply, that
“part of our difficulty arises from an ambiguity
contained in the single word ‘guilt’ which can
refer both to the ontological state of being or
being judged to be guilty and the psychological
or experiential state of feeling guilty” (Carveth
Section II par. 11). Feeling guilty is a deluge of
discomfort as the body recognizes an internal and
external pressure to address a misdeed.

Fig. 14
Fig. 14: Latex cured with a stained patchily to bring out a
fleshy color that can depict the underside of the skin. In the film, the
fingers try to slowly remove it from the piece of leather it is stuck to.
Schiller, Friedrich. ‘Wallenstein: A Historical Drama in Three
Parts’. Trans. Charles E. Passage. New York:
Ungar. 1958. pp. 16
32

Serres, Michel. ‘Les cinq sens: Philosophie des corpes mêlés’.
Paris: Grasset. 1985. pp. 17
33

Carveth, Donald L. ‘The Unconscious Need for Punishment:
Expression or Evasion of the Sense of Guilt?’. York University.
Section II. 2004. par. 1-11. www.yorku.ca/dcarveth/guilt.html
34

21

Guilt and shame are both emotions that consume
the subject because of how the sense of self comes
into question. Being bound up by a degree of
self-recognition brings one to an unusual level
of awareness and self-critique. But one also finds
themselves wanting to resolve this by renewing
their relationship with the self. Shame is therefore
“not an isolating act that can be detached from
the self” (Ahmed 105) as much as it may feel
debilitating.
I am working on a video-performance piece that
reflects upon the personal discomfort I experience
when trying to submit to a state of rest. Being a
self critical over-thinker makes winding down and
falling asleep for me a mammoth task. The solitude
found in the dark stillness of the night, and in
the horizontal orientation of the body, is often
prickled by feelings of guilt and shame. In these
moments I am always reminded of my worries
around taking up more space than I should. Taller
than my peers and ergonomically dis-included
more often than not, I find myself contorting
my body into forcefully compact positions. Like
in the scenario of a family road-trip sitting in
the trunk of the car was something I grew up
volunteering to do because of my self-confirmed
need for contortion. As a result, even when I lie
in my own bed, my body performs a dance of
discomfort. I toss and turn, tuck my arms under
my torso, lie flat on my stomach with my head
under the pillow. After that, I try to consciously

lie plank-like and straight to counter the aches
from prior contortions. When I finally do fall
asleep though, I involuntarily assume the fetal
position. It's the position I find myself in, the
many times I wake up during the night. It's the
position that never lets my body feel rested. I've
become interested in wanting to observe this
bodily discomfort via a video document. The kind
of dis-ease that this is, has nothing to do with
being female-bodied or visible yet it proves that
these are the dis-eases I have internalized.
I am my only audience as I try to visualize these
from various angles every night. I originally
imagined affixing a camera in a dark room with
a high ceiling, capturing a wide-angled top shot
of my body trying to sleep. But I went with the
effect created by Ana Mendieta in‘Glass on Body
Imprints ’. The flattened flesh on a glass-top table
(see Fig. 23 & 24) is how my skin comes to feature
in this work. As this is also my manner of coming
out of hiding- subjecting myself to my own
camera by placing it under the glass-top table to
it watches me try to sleep is an added strain of
discomfort that makes this a performance.
The traces of contained dis-ease in my body have
been best accessed by the impact of strongly
posed moving images. I'm forever challenged
to teach myself through close observations and
experimentation how to deliver a similarly
tangible impact.

Fig. 15
Fig. 15: Stills from an in-progress performance on sleep and
discomfort.

skin (as) visual language
orange peels, resin, nylon, latex, glue, fuller’s earth, crepe
bandage and snow.

The material imitations of skin used on-set are
more than mere properties in my absurdist short
fiction films. By working with them, a visual
language that can speak to the phenomenological
attributes of skin has emerged. Skin has held
up fort for the body as a representative of the
self, spirit, soul and home and so, I try to regard
skin’s own way of speaking while interpreting and
representing it.
Think of a bodily memory that has been borne by your skin.

The subjects in my films have all been women.
They have granted me access to their personal
space through experiences of discomfort. I’ve
come to think of them as collaborators. In looking
at existing visual language cues, from within the
discipline of video-based performance, I found
the female body being framed from an intimate
distance 35 similar to what I was being trusted with
by these women. As such a proximity suggests
an autobiographical and confessional voice, the
active blurring of bodily boundaries between the
subject and the camera was important for me to
justify. Each subject therefore finds their
narrative to be operating on an equal playing
field as we mould a vocabulary for the body of
work together. The metaphors and materials in
the films are posed to evoke a textural resonance

22

with aspects of skin. Each subject has been given
the chance to think about the material that can
be use as their metaphor, or like that the narrator
of their dis-ease. I ensure that we are on the same
page about how that material will get read, as we
find a diagnosis that can visualize an invisible
feeling fetched from memory.
The gesture in each film is either uncomfortable,
restless or both as it is an act of locating feeling.
I capture this restlessness rather restlessly, as
the depth of field for the 100mm lens uncovers
information in slivers. I mostly shoot indoors and
with low lighting, asking each subject to interact
with the material and the theme they chose.
There is an aspect of performance given how a
premeditated action emerges and gets repeated
several times till we arrive at an acceptable
abstraction of the chosen dis-ease. As these
gestures and actions are not end-goal oriented,
I only know what I’m doing in the act of looking
through the lens.
The image-making can be called investigative, as
I am indeed trying to envision bodily memories
as dis-eases. I have been invested, in this way,
in looking at skin as the receptor and container
of feeling. To heighten the idea of discomfort,
the restless moving image also calls out to the
voyeur in the viewer as they fleetingly access an
act of intimacy with the body of a stranger. The
lens captures an image that the naked eye cannot

Extreme close-ups may render the body indecipherable, but
the viewer's position is constantly challenged by the filmmaker's
voice. Kate Craig (in Delicate Issue) blurs the fascination that
might come out of illegible images and turns the act of looking
into an analytical, political and critical act, a commitment on the
part of the observer... Delicate Issue ponders and works around the
distance that we keep to see things, the duration necessary to see;
the relation between the recorded body and the body which looks,
the dislocation between what is seen and treated as a fragment or
detail and the whole. The viewer is literally enjoined to exist. see
Craig, Skin . pp 25.

35

23

see by itself and with searching gestures in the
image that are rather odd to observe. I envision
the becoming film composition to operate as a
chaptered visual essay where each chapter can
be read or encountered separately but also in
conjunction with other chapters, in the gallery
space. Laying a non-linear narrative of these
separate experiences of skin through multiple
bodies and quasi narratives, is the intention.

an immersive or embodied experience using
media within this darkened booth will be such
that the stillness inside the booth will engage the
viewers still body to the moving body of the film.
Another aspect of the booth will be a parabolic
speaker, the sound from which will suggest the
viewing distance for the viewer. The feeling of
other bodies, also in the same space, is a physicality
that I wish to do away with.

While I hope for the image to evoke affect36 with
its tactility, I try to add unlikely sound effects that
disturb and disrupt the everyday experience of
skin. In the next few films I bring in various parts
of the body framed in ambiguous ways, to let skin
become a surface for the visual inquiry and an
extension of the bodies of viewers as the tactility,
temperature or perceived pain gets extended to
the experience of viewing.

As the engagement of the senses is crucial I'd really
like the experience to be one of transference.
While the enclosure is a curtain, the media in
the enclosure is also surrounding the viewer by
packing the sound and image inside this body-like
structure, in agreement with the found privacy.
The discomforting kind of solitude that this
encounter with the bodies in the films and the
body of the film insists upon is hopefully going to
make the viewing experience one of vulnerability
and immersion. When I showed the first two films
on commodores as opposed to on flat screens, the
materials in the films were able to find an outer
body to enunciate their references to the human
body. Additionally, not using rectangular frames
for my films is a way to re-privilege the image with
neither the horizontal and nor the vertical given
an imposition in space, and letting the viewing
eye imagine what lies beyond the frame.

I plan to re-purpose the RBC Media Gallery in
the Michael O'Brian Commons at Emily Carr
's Great Northern Way Campus, by building an
intimate one-person viewing booth made by
hanging blackout curtains from a semi-elliptical
false ceiling. This will come to look like a booth
that one needs to slip inside to watch the films.
I’ve come to believe that media installation
work can be pushed to shape the experience of
the viewer by way not stopping short at making
strong images but by also making choices around
their spatial dispersion. The scope for initiating

Affect is a visceral, raw pre-feeling. Feelings are socially constructed distortions of affect. Affect is the manifestation of the
body’s internalization of an intensity. It cannot be rendered by
language or any other kind of transmittable information. Affect
is perpetually undulating and reforming. It is more bodily than
cognitive. The body is integral to the understanding of affect.
Massumi describes the “walls” of the body as sensory receptors
which allow for the intensity of an experience to be transmitted
and internalized. The transmission of affect is not the exchange
of affect from thing to body or body to body, it is the in folding
and unfolding of intensities between the two bodies, which can be
virtual or flesh. These intensities resonate apart from intended
meaning of context. see Massumi, Brian. “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements.” In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
36

skin (as) dis.ease
Clementine asks Joel to hide her.
As the technicians from Lacuna Ltd. 37 actively erase all
traces of her from his brain she says to him, “Hide me
somewhere deeper, somewhere really buried”.
“Where?”, he asks.
“Hide me in your humiliation.” 38

In the sequence that this exchange from 'Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)' is sourced,
screenplay writer Charlie Kaufman doesn’t stop
short at recognizing humiliation as a festering
abscess in the body (or in the body of memory, to
be contextually precise). He also deems it to be a
safe place to hide.
‘Skins’ was where I drew upon a similar
manifestation of the human tendency to hide, as
a form of self-protection with the skin serving as
the hide39. Being peeled or exposed - and with that
- freed (from a state of hiding), sound to me like
terrifying possibilities to explore in parallel. The
irony for me though, is that while hiding is my
dis-ease it is also in hiding that I currently
claim being free. And similarly, dishonesty one affliction of my dis-ease- is a manner
of negotiating power. So, the discomfort in
hiding, like spoken of before, has come to make
dishonesty comfortable.
What is it to be free?
Is one fleeing from feeling or feeling free?

It's difficult to pin down a point in time or a first
offense before which I can claim an uninterrupted
state of comfort (or freedom), the way Sheila
Kelley40 could in her TEDx talk where describes
her body's first encounter with shame. I’ve come
to accept the discomfort in hiding as a permanent
bodily condition that has in fact activated for
me an inadvertent state of consciousness. Stage
fright, camera shyness and performance anxiety
have made me recognize ‘discomfited’ as an
operational state, and an important factor in the
conscious making of my visible self. To empower
myself by embracing this discomfort has been
the underlying principle of this thesis.
I hope to continue drawing from the intangibility
of such long-term feelings that collide within
our subjective realities. The original intention
to use skin as a visual landscape was to express
discomfort stemming from the personal, but
a closer inspection of skin has brought with it
dis-eases that fetch from gender, body politics,
race and even intimacy. By continuing to find
more participants with diverse memories of
discomfort, I will continue to discomfort the
viewer with these bodies in agreement with me to
make peace with their dis-ease.

24

Lacuna Ltd. is a fictional organization in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that helps clients erase memories of
persons that they want to deliberately forget.

37

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dir. Michel Gondry, Story and Screenplay Charlie Kaufman. Focus Features. 2004. DVD.
38

The word "hide" is related to the German word "Haut" which
means skin. Common commercial hides include leather from
cattle and other livestock animals, buckskin, alligator skin and
snake skin.
39

Kelley, Sheila. ‘Let’s Get Naked’ TEDxAmericanRiviera. 2012.
“So my first offense happened when I was seven ...I was hanging
out with my best friends, Brian and Donald Doyle, they were 7
and 8 respectively, we were hanging out in the backyard, it was
summer, it was really hot, we were playing, we decided to take a
break and we went to cool down, so we all took our tops off and we
laid back in the grass, arms over the head, it was an awesome day,
the air was cooling my chest, it was a beautiful, innocent day. And
all of a sudden the upstairs window of their house was flying open
and Mrs Doyle stuck her head out and she screamed in the most
piercing voice, “Sheila Kelley! You naughty little girl! You put your
top on immediately, you ought to be ashamed of yourself and go
home.”
40

skin (as) feeling vessel
The fact that I defended the dis-eases of
several bodies, including my own colored female
vessel, in a space carefully populated by media
based bodies, was how I chose to make a gendered
and racial statement instead of deliberating
and carefully addressing aspects of race
and gender as imprints on skin. I have touched
upon these subjects too briskly in previous
chapters, which is a direct result of my deliberation
and hesitation in entering the political
space where the body finds itself drained in
color, with that color called skin. Skin as a
feeling vessel comes colored like the body
as a habitat comes labeled. I am a woman of
color with a physical body and boundary that
is marked as Muslim. This was something I
was hoping to address in my defense, but it
was not taken up in the discussion. I was also
excited to disclose my feminist leanings (and not
groundings) as I have begun to think about the
space I take up as a Muslim woman
rather differently owing to this project.
In my defense what got touched upon were
the ideas around embodiment through media
composed bodies of sound and image. I was asked
some generative questions and like that allowed
to unpack the details about the processes of
making and installing the work. I showed two
video-works, namely, ‘Trial Room (201718) ’ and ‘Dance (2018) ’. They were separately

25

installed within the same room with suggested
conjunctions despite individual conjectures.
For ‘Trial Room’ a figurative room was constructed
within the RBC Media Gallery. Using a wooden
false ceiling, I was able to drop four oxford blue
black-out curtains, each measuring 11 ' in length,
from along the perimeter of the ceiling to form a
semi-circular screening space. The wall-mounted
short throw projector allowed the viewing level
to be defined at the height of 7'. A key aspect of
this room within a room was the DIY parabolic
speaker that housed the sound inside a hollow
wooden bowl before releasing it into the space.
These were manners of giving the forms of media
more physical bodies. The images were textural
and the sound was air pressure (see Fig. 16).
To invite viewers inside this Trial Room was
to bring them into a physical confrontation
with the dis-eased bodies of the women in the
projected media. Something about the lack of a
narrative allowed the qualities of the image to take
precedence. The sound design gave the moving
images a bodily dimension- grainy, cold,
slippery, gooey, membranous, dry, dust like.
Laying a landscape of attributes that relate to the
body through skin. While Merleau-Ponty has
argued that “we are not able to see without
being seen, or touch without being touched”41,
manners of seeing & touching can be challenged.

Fig. 16
Fig. 16: Installation view of the work 'Trial Room (2018)' at the
RBC Media Gallery- the constructed booth, the short throw projection and the wooden parabolic speaker. Adiba Muzaffar.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'The Visible and the Invisible'
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp 147

41

26

The "mimetic relationship"42 between technology
and the body, as Laura U. Marks has referred
to in The Skin of the Film, is what drives the
impulse of making the second piece shown
at the defense exhibition, titled 'Dance'. As
mentioned before, this dance is a dance of
discomfort that I perform in order to fall asleep.
By sleeping on top of a glass table with a Canon
80D and a 24-70 mm wide angle lens shooting
from underneath me, the body is made
conscious about its performance of camera-like
movements, as the camera is deliberately kept
out of reach to be a silent viewer in parallel. The
self-conscious mind's eye becomes confessional.
So it is not a sleeping body at all. It writhes in
a (somewhat humorous) kind of restlessness
and agony. The manner in which it is
edited and projected too brings forth ideas of
constriction with the cropping and stacking
of multiple shots in a single frame, that form
conversations between the different parts of
the body as if laid over a moving scanner that is
trying to recognize the concentrations of
dis-ease. Shown in the corner of the media
gallery, but visible when framed by the glass door,
it is meant to give the impression that someone
has decided to hide in the nook, for a quick nap.
One needs to go all the way inside and discover the
blue frame framing the media projection
and the headset inviting to be worn. As one wears

the headset, the hum of the room suddenly
gets magnified as another room of similar
construct comes alive and a body within it, my
body, attempts to or seeks to sleep. This
is also the reasoning provided for the sound
design for this work- the breathing of the
room and its architecture being relayed
rather than the breathing of the body as it
is what the body is meditating upon instead
of upon itself.
In these few ways the bodies of the technology
come into a collaboration that is in a near equal
level of consciousness, or in a gestural kind of
performance with the performer. The booth,
the parabolic speaker, the nook painted blue:
these are all in hope to activate more for the
viewer as they come and try to decode a moving
image. It is not simply a stirring image but one
exposing its motivations. For me, these nonverbal
cues and hints are the non-fictional, human-like
nature of the film. And like that my practice has
only been steered to explore its own tendencies
by being mimetic. Both of these films are not just
about non-fictional film subjects but also about
their counterparts; the relational objects that
make seeing, hearing, touching and really
experience the film subject, a possibility.

Fig. 17
Fig. 17: Installation view of the work 'Dance (2018)' at the RBC
Media Gallery. The reflections and shadows in the space adding
more lines to the stacked image as the wall and door of the gallery
crop and un-crop it into becoming visible.
Marks, Laura U. 'The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment, and the Senses', "The Memory of the Senses". Duke
Univ. Press, 2007 pp 251
42

acknowledgments
I'd like to start by acknowledging that the work
made for the purposes of this thesis project
materialised
on
the
stolen
and
unceded traditional territories of the
Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh
nations. I'd also like to add that I recognize my
responsibility to participate in the reparations
towards the First Nations of Canada/Turtle Island.

to share from it. Highly worthy of my
gratitude are Jamie Hilder and Henry Tsang,
humans of admirable critique for my rather
meandering manner of thinking. I'd like to
thank them both for letting me take my time as I
made up my mind. I also want to thank them for
making me believe in my writing skills, which
have never before been employed in this way.

I'd like to go on to acknowledge Emily Carr
University of Art and Design for allowing me
to be a part of the two year MFA program hence
concluded, as a result of which I can say I have
had a language level transformation in the
processes of making media work. Without
the guidance of all my faculty members and
without the support of the technical staff at Emily
Carr, I wouldn't have the kind of belief I have in
myself today to speak of bodies using just bodies.

Next, I'd like to thank my people, other
students from within the MFA 2018 cohort and
well-wishers from friend circles. Karin Kunzo,
Melina Querel, Aaniya Asrani, Pilar Guinea Gil,
Emilie Grace Lavoie, Yeonoo Park, Michal Cabaj
and Emelina Soares have all carried some of the
weight of this project for and with me, and I can
never let them forget how grateful I am for how
they took out the time to give my work value.

I'd like to specifically voice my gratitude for
Patricia Kelly, Cissie Fu, Randy Lee Cutler and
Heather Fitzgerald for being the women who
were able to challenge me and my developing
a research methodology to responsibly produce
work that I may not think is fully concluded
but makes me believe in the fuller potential of
my discomfort and anger as a woman and an
artist. I am also extremely grateful to Laura U.
Marks for being present in my work through her
evocative writing and then in my committee,

Finally, I must thank Sanjeev Rao, the person
who took the brunt of each vague success and
failure gracefully, irrespective of my own bouts
of disgrace. Thanks for still being in love with
me and for reminding me that mediocrity is
something to proudly fear. I'd also like to thank
my sister, Sabika Muzaffar and my parents
Saiyed Muzaffar Ishtiaque and Shahina Taiyeb.
You may or may not be here with me because of
a visa gamble but whenever I have put my best
foot forward, I have known that it has meant
taking my favorite parts of you all with me.

27

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29

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