Devised and performed by Anju Marie Kasturiraj for Beaconsfield Gallery in Vauxhall, London 1 February 2024. AUTOFICTION 1 is an audience participatory endurance performance. The performer kneels on rice for 30 minutes. Audience members are invited to sit on the cushion in front of her. There are three raw eggs in the bowl, which audience members can choose to crack open and feed to the performer.
Kneeling on rice is a form of repentance in Catholicism, a common punishment within BDSM practices, and an old fashioned disciplinary method in South Asian households.
AUTOFICTION 1 TEXT
AUTOFICTION 1 - TEXT is a performatively assembled print. The text to produce the phantom image was hand-assembled on a traditional letterpress. The final image was printed in white ink and finished off with a drop of blood from the index finger.
This project explores performance as both materiality and as a method of making objects through rituals. With the exception of a quote that appears towards the end of the text, the individual characters used were limited to a singular type case. This resulted in codes made from numbers and symbols when the necessary letters ran out. The text took 18 hours to assemble and print, and the process served as a meditation on the ownership and loss of narrative autonomy.
The original text is from a hand written surrealist automatism project titled Venerative Autofiction, which details personal experiences with South Indian coming of age rites, intercut with prose confronting the politics of desire.
*Fully legible version of text available upon request
