”The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills.” -Hemingway
Born Slippy! reframes the author’s existing archive of exchanges as an immigrant in the US, with men who confront personal and political violence. This work further portrays individual and collective masculinity, power, and vulnerability through its embrace of silence and the subliminal. Through repeated gestures and positions, this becomes a photo-text-based work that weaves together a journey of men from different walks of life, caught between the desire to integrate and the acceptance of living on the margins, holding on to all they have. Through fragmentary writings and staged, playful portraits of men they met over time, the artist plays the game to explore these beautiful men, their desires, fears, and friendships. The work intends to examine masculinity not just as a genetic trait but as socially constructed, and to argue that one must acknowledge its fluid nature in the process.
Men account for approximately 75% of the one million annual suicide deaths worldwide. Emerging research indicates a link between suicide and men's active pursuit of hegemonic masculinity via emotional restriction. A report from the American Psychological Association points to economic insecurity, isolation, and adherence to a rigid masculinity ideology as major drivers of distress for men and boys.
The work continues to examine the issues of alienation in individualist societies under post-capitalism, primarily in America; the performative nature of being that comes with it challenges the codes of American hypermasculinity and questions the nature of man through the lens of migration and identity.
The next chapter is intended to be set in the author’s homeland in India, at a time of the rise of right-wing nationalism, to explore how that relates to the notion of manliness and the visual strategies one can use to dismantle it and embrace softness and care.
