A gasp of air: posthuman intimacies in Tejal Shah’s Between the Waves

Abstract

What does it mean to make love to trash? Experimental video artist Tejal Shah’s work has consistently thought through the limits and capacities of the image to address queer sexuality. In their most recent work, Between the Waves, the artist visualizes a lush feminist dystopia at the end of the world as we know it. Images of bodies – human, plant, and other life – are brought together in shifting relations of intimacy amidst landfill waste, forest swamps, and deserted beaches. This paper develops a temporal critique of Shah’s installation, focusing on waiting as a queer dystopian form of cohabitation. While postcolonialism’s temporality has focused on the hauntings of the past in the present, in this article I take postcolonial interventions into linear temporality as informative for imagining queer postcolonial futures. Through the paper, I pay close attention to the acousmatic sounds of aspiration and nondiegetic breath, contending that such encounters render a postcolonial and posthuman ethics of queer care for selves and others in the midst of environmental ruin.

Keywords:

• Acousmatic sound
• experimental film
• digital media
• environmentalism
• temporality
• queerness
• race
• feminism
• postcolonialism
• Gilles Deleuze
• Frantz Fanon
• Tejal Shah

Acknowledgements

This paper would not have been possible without the encouragement and valuable feedback of Jean-Thomas Tremblay. Tejal Shah was generous with both their time and their material, and thinking with their work is always a pleasure. Discussions with Ariella Azoulay, Leela Gandhi, Ellen Rooney, Rebecca Schneider, Hongwei Thorn Chen, and Phil Rosen were formative for the writing. Questions and comments on different versions of this writing from Nathan Lee, Marissa Brostoff, Summer Kim Lee, and Ethan Philbrick remain invaluable. Discussions with the participants in the Gender and Sexuality Studies workshop and the Modern Culture and Media Graduate Symposium spurred productive revisions to this manuscript. Aaron Kovalchik and Anna Thomas were kind enough to read versions of this writing as it evolved. I’m grateful for their patience and good sense. Funding from the Cogut Institute for the Humanities through the Brown In The World travel grant allowed me to complete the travel for this research.

Notes

1. I borrow the term ‘untimely’ from Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1999) Untimely Meditations. The untimely here marks both the sense of being torn from linear temporality and the potential for recursive temporalities or forms of return. I take the critique of historicism that is developed in the second meditation, ‘On The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,’ to resonate with the postcolonial critique of linear temporality that I outlined above. See also Amit Rai’s (2009) writing on Bollywood cinema and temporality in Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage.

2. I will not revisit in this essay the long debates within film studies on indexicality. However, I will note that the ‘index’ as a sign has two functions: first as a physical trace and second as deictic (a form of pointing in the moment of articulation, e.g. the shifters ‘I’ or ‘you’). Shah’s work takes for granted not the disappearance of the physical trace, but rather that these two functions need not be in tandem. Often in this work, the physical trace of the referent (object before the camera) contradicts or breaks with what it points us to. More on this later. For recent discussions of film indexicality, see the special issue of differences on the topic edited by Doane (2007).

3. My use of poetics, and particularly the invocation of touch as a mode of care, is informed by Hypatia Vourloumis’ writing on queer forms of touch (Vourloumis, 2015).

4. All figures are film stills from Between The Waves, courtesy of the artist and Project 88.

5. Of course what constitutes a ‘long take’ is subjective, as film theorists have already pointed out. See, for example, discussions of long takes in the emergence of ‘slow cinema’ (de Luca and Jorge 2016). I am using the ‘long take’ here to mark the still camera and extended scenes of repeated action that are predominant in this work, though no single take is longer than about a minute in the whole piece.