Sumana Akter - অবিন্যস্ত সংলাপেরা

Curatorial Text

“How does one share an unsettled sense of belonging/commune, or solidarity without resolving the struggle of being in one static threshold—or being rendered immobile—into a tragic correspondence? What does it mean to come together without requiring that our differences arrive at a singular point of un-arrival?” - footnotes from the earliest in conversation between Sumana and Kaur.

In imagining this coming together with Sumana, অবিন্যস্ত সংলাপেরা / Across the Periphery of the Interval) s(never appeared as a singular or absolute form. Rather, the possibility of this encounter/s—much like her expanded practice, has slowly been mending its own path through broken timelines, interrupted gestures, and correspondences that do not necessarily lead towards resolution. Our alliance began through a shared curiosity about the untimely appearance of actions: how they emerge, interrupt, and exceed the established conditions of performativity and the loose glossaries surrounding the poetics of spectacle.

I had been following Sumana’s trajectory with keen interest since we first met at a resistance group gathering during the Kolkata International Performance Art Festival. Over time, her presence in that exchange came to mean more than an engagement with categories, which we might read as cartographies of time, or the production of discrete works. It opened up a way of thinking alongside one another—as allies—in which the work generated its own temporality, and what mattered was not only what was produced, but also what an action set into motion.

Across the Timeline

Since last year, as we have been tracing these uncategorized threads together, I have become increasingly attentive to a recurring sense of glitch, a kind of corroding disturbance within our conversations. It appears around questions of time, spirit, and the ingredients of revolt: what gathers within an interval*, what interrupts its apparent continuity, and what remains active after an action has ended?

*Perhaps the interval is not simply a pause between events, but a contested site where an action’s meanings are unsettled, reworked, and carried into other situations.

- Kaur Chimuk