A long vertical rod on the wall. Attached to it, midway, is the Urdu word Chup — but incomplete. The letters are there, recognisable, but the word does not finish itself. It stops. And in stopping, it says everything.
Chup means quiet. Be silent. Stop talking. It is what you say to someone when you have decided that what they are saying does not need to be heard. It is a small word with a long history — spoken by authorities, by institutions, by social pressure, by the invisible rules of what is acceptable and what is not. The poets, the outspoken, the ones who said what others were only thinking — they have always been met with some version of it.
The word here is unfinished, as if it was interrupted mid-thought. As if the very act of writing it was itself stopped. The vertical rod — tall, austere, almost architectural — holds this incomplete utterance at its side, neither releasing it nor erasing it. It exists in the space between speech and silence, between the thought and the permission to say it.
This work is not only about being silenced by others. It is about the moment we silence ourselves — when we have already absorbed the boundaries so completely that we do the stopping before anyone else has to ask. That is the quieter, more unsettling question Shushed is sitting with.
Shushed | Acrylics on wood | 72 x 15 x 3 inches approx | 2018
Shushed
A long vertical rod on the wall. Attached to it, midway, is the Urdu word Chup — but incomplete. The letters are there, recognisable, but the word does not finish itself. It stops. And in stopping, it says everything.
Chup means quiet. Be silent. Stop talking. It is what you say to someone when you have decided that what they are saying does not need to be heard. It is a small word with a long history — spoken by authorities, by institutions, by social pressure, by the invisible rules of what is acceptable and what is not. The poets, the outspoken, the ones who said what others were only thinking — they have always been met with some version of it.
The word here is unfinished, as if it was interrupted mid-thought. As if the very act of writing it was itself stopped. The vertical rod — tall, austere, almost architectural — holds this incomplete utterance at its side, neither releasing it nor erasing it. It exists in the space between speech and silence, between the thought and the permission to say it.
This work is not only about being silenced by others. It is about the moment we silence ourselves — when we have already absorbed the boundaries so completely that we do the stopping before anyone else has to ask. That is the quieter, more unsettling question Shushed is sitting with.
Shushed | Acrylics on wood | 72 x 15 x 3 inches approx | 2018