how many songs from a single note? by Sarah Naqvi

About

TARQ is delighted to announce Sarah Naqvi’s first solo show, how many songs in a single note? opening on October 13th for Art Night Thursday. The artworks in this show, including video installation, tapestry, drawings, paintings, and sculptures, emanate from Naqvi’s brave confrontation of identity-based injustice in the current socio-political landscape. Naqvi juxtaposes dissent with tenderness of family, care and healing in the domestic layout of this exhibition. 

Featuring works like a little poem and gastronomical essays, Naqvi uses humour alongside a familiar visual language to express complex views in an approachable form. The works in this show also trace Naqvi’s journey of redefining the meaning of safety and resistance after having moved out of India three years ago. For example, in the multimedia tapestry and video work Index of Dystopia, Naqvi investigates the possibility of defiance from a distance through vocabulary nurtured by their found family in Amsterdam. Naqvi elaborates, “found family really shapes our resistance in the care we give each other and ways we are able to protect each other.”

In an excerpt from the accompanying catalogue essay, curatorial advisor Shaunak Mahbubani notes, “Sarah straddles the interiority of trans-queer existence with the exteriority of a rapidly changing social landscape in the tense comfort of the domestic realm. In this assemblage created over four years, they propose tools, strategies, songs, and gestures to nurture multihued familial kinships as tender acts of survival in a world hurtling towards vapid homogeneity.”

Intrinsic to Naqvi’s practice is their queer identity. Their new paintings feature tender moments of queer intimacy and collective care that nurture energies for continual dissent. Furthermore, the artist questions the very nature of resistance for a queer person whose existence is a continuous act of defiance against normativity. This language of queer defiance extends to the title of the show, which draws from Naqvi’s practice of singing, alluding to the polyphonic nature of love and revolution while cautioning us against the monotony of a choiceless future.