Neha Misra

VIRTUAL TOUR

Dream Girls

Tension is best described as a kind of unrest. By the laws of physics, tension is a pulling or stretching force transmitted along an object. With my objectifiable body, perpetually living through tensions in all forms, tension may be best described as being caught between a rock and a hard place; caught between my upbringing and my true self, whatever Neha may be.

Through my chosen medium of discarded plastics, cosmetics and make-up, I’ve shifted my previous body of work into an introspective journey; navigating archetypical Indian womanhood from the lens of a tortured, digitalized landscape where existence is curated before it lives. Through the mysterious existence of the cosmetics world’s disturbing iconography, and by extension, my mother’s image, it is here where I situate the tensions within girlhood in attempts to realize why it’s damage; creating plastic bodies become symbolic of my journey to acceptance of what bodies can be in my reality; on the road to redemption. The various manifestations of my works tend to operate as phantom-representations of the ideals I simultaneously challenge and redeem. I never find myself truly defining what redeemability means for me, as I am perpetually stuck between the tensions of being the ideal woman, and existing as its antithesis. This pretty, ugly final Body is reflective of the stigmatized feminine, traversing all genres of girlhood, to becoming an underdog of my redemption arc; unveiling tensions in which girlhood lives in a greater, unforgiving landscape of a Western, colonialist, and masculinist gaze. Tension, in every disfigurement, becomes an extension of the skin I live in, and becomes feelings unsaid - torn between ideal womanhood and the other, still returning to perpetual unrest as I live a life where I exist as the antithesis of it.