‘The Floor Keeps Count’ marks a turning inward of the artist’s gaze on urban landscapes—her interest in mapping their vicissitudes and discovering creative possibilities in ruin. Recent set of events—a series of illnesses and deaths in the family; the care required by her ageing grandfather; and the prospect of losing her family home, one of the few remaining links to her past—have led the artist to turn her tools on this beloved abode, dissecting its memory-shaped rooms, holding their contents up to the light.
The excavatory impulse is two-fold: to understand the phenomenology of how the house, with all its complex harborings of intimacy, comfort, and solitude, shapes our psyche, and to salvage what parts of it she can; thereby renewing the lease on the resident memories. Assiduously, she goes about recording the different nooks and corners in the house, the texture of its peeling walls, the play of light through its windows, as well as the deep-set routines written across its spaces, in what feels like a breathless bid to commit these details to memory while transferring their custody to new material in the face of imminent loss.
Throughout the exhibition, the house simultaneously figures as a metaphor and materialised memory. In recalling its mnemonic and phenomenological functions, ‘The Floor Keeps Count’ not only pays homage to the house and its inhabitant but seeks a material exploration of the broader processes of memory—its senescence and folding, fabrication and synthesis. Against erasure and oblivion, it musters possibilities for salvage and remembrance, reinventing that shell of memory.