Namrata Arjun works with re-orienting memory, and the neuroqueering of historical and cultural references through the autobiographical. In the process, they surface neurodivergent perspectives, engage thick, queer, crip time and push back against inherited disappearances within/through figurative painting. By painting their own (normatively read as “female”) body in the first-person perspective, they position their body or vantage point as a personal framing device, (re)producing images/conventions that normalise neuroqueer perspectives/depathologize unmasked neurodivergent spatialities or temporalities.
Time is rendered as non-linear or layered or nested-within-itself, while the ground is reconfigured into a vibrant, perpetually-shifting or animate negative, in-between space (dis)oriented by multiple perspectives. They conflate categories of subject/object, centre and periphery, alternating between (gender) dysphoria and (neuroqueer) joy by grappling with family photographs, images re-constructed from dreams or mythological texts, rituals, gestures from living performance traditions, and colonial archives, engaging in a politic of pushing back against inherited disappearances to implicate or include the viewer.