Puer Deorum: Security Checks II

Travelling back to London from Kolkata airport, February 2024, trouble ensued, and a private interrogation in an unknown location inside the airport took place. (In)human bones were uncovered in the checked luggage, having previously passed the borders of Jaipur and Dhaka airport relatively undetected and unscathed.

Security Checks is a side story to the live durational performance work by the artist "Stones of Baked Clay," originally performed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, February 2024. 

The Sculpture, made from terracotta ceramics, wire and meticulously carved from Jaipur Blue Pottery features poetry written over 2023-2024.

Jaipur Blue Pottery, a dying craft that only exists within Jaipur, Rajasthan in India, was brought by Muslim Mughals from Central Asia. The material is a dough that uses powdered compounds made up of materials such as quartz and powdered glass, and goes through a low temperature firing and a total of 42 step process to get to its final product, making both the process and outcome extremely fragile compared to traditional clay based ceramics.

The poem on the rib is a visceral response to Peruvian artist Wynnie Mynerva’s “The First Cut” (2023), a surgically removed piece of her rib, originally displayed at The New Museum as part of her solo exhibition, reflecting on the biblical mythology of Lilith and Eve. In response to Mynerva’s poignant and haunting work, the poem serves as an ode to her piece and the ongoing violence of museum spaces and their anthropological gaze on marginalised bodies. The on the skull, inspired by the Quranic verse from Surah Al Fil, narrates the story of birds defending against the "People of the Elephants" by pelting them with stones of baked clay, symbolising and paying homage to strength and resilience amidst global genocide and war.

Product Information

2024

Risograph Print Edition of 10

A3

About the Artist

Puer Deorum is an interdisciplinary artist and curator whose work balances sentient negotiations between weight and ephemerality within the scope of mortality, weaving incantations of love and teasing temporalities. Creating non-linear realities with familiar, yet accentuated tropes within a polychronic experience of time and narrating surreal paracosms with harmonious references to psycho/socio political geographies, amplifying the mundanity of everyday proprioceptive and embodied feeling.

Selected sharings of their art include: REProduce, Dystopia Biennial, Berlin (2024), Hugo Boss, London (2023), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023) and Instrument Inventors, The Hague (2023). Solo exhibitions: Filet Gallery, London (2023), Quench Gallery, Margate (2021). Selected awards: Set Studio Prize (2021) and Arts Council DYCP Grant (2023). They curated and produced ELO MELO, a multi-media festival across Whitechapel Gallery and Toynbee Hall, London with Oitij-jo Collective (2023). 

Shipping

This work is part of our 2024 Winter Fundraiser and will be available for collection or shipping from 14th - 20th December. Please note all items will be shipped via Royal Mail Tracked 24 unless stated otherwise.