Come with your own light

Latitude 28 presents Baroda-based Komal Mistri’s solo show titled ‘Come With Your Own Light’ chronicling unheard voices reverberating behind the closed doors of the unhinged mechanised labour room. The show started on April 12 and will be on display till June 15.

Mistri spent three months in the enclosed spaces of hospitals across Gujarat. Documenting the process of childbirth that has been ritualised and considered throughout civilisations as sacred and a celebratory phenomenon, Mistri captures and interprets the unspoken narratives that mark the transformation of the woman’s body and psyche, a space marked by unpredictability, vulnerability, and trust.

She captures her complex emotions and difficult stances in women’s lives documenting the labour room processes through interventionist photographic works and found objects using them as the primary element of her work to manifest collective pain and deprivation.

In the realm of the labour room consisting of spotlighted beds and surgery tools, lies the tale of embroidered bodies bewildered if to feel pleasure in pain or pain in pleasure.

Laying on the bed, contemplating her identity, the pregnant woman wonders about her dual and frustrated state of being.

The exhibit delves into the possibility of forming an archive of emotions surrounding the phase of childbirth. A vast majority of women are deprived of proper medical attention and are forced to push the limits of their physical capacity to complete the process.

The socio-economic conditions of rural India constantly thrust women into a gender-discriminatory struggle of enduring pain beyond their limits.

When: Ongoing till June 15
Where: F-208 FF, Lado Sarai, Latitude 28