Category: Q&A — Published:
Puer Deorum is an interdisciplinary artist whose work balances negotiations between weight and ephemerality. Encapsulating embodied feelings, they tease temporalities through endurance and duration, amplifying (inter)personal experiences through dream sequences and interpretive actions.
We interviewed Puer Deorum while preparing their exhibition arms blue, knees bare at Whitechapel Gallery from Saturday 22 to Sunday 23 February 2025, which is activated on the Saturday by the performance hold me while my mind falters. The exhibition and performance are presented by Puer Deorum and done in partnership with Oitij-jo.
Puer Deorum, ‘Cold Hands Get Stuck in Sand’, 2024, Live Performance at Verses of the Love-Dead, Photos by India Bharadwaj
Your exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery arms blue, knees bare combines installation, film photography, and sound, to explore notions of identity, memory, and the archiving of lived experiences. As visitors are invited to navigate the space and piece together meanings from the elements they encounter, how much of your identity are you prepared to leave open to interpretation or even to be ‘lost in translation’? Does the installation intentionally embrace opacity and the desire to remain undecipherable—inviting multiple interpretations rather than guiding the viewer through a single narrative lens?
Identity as a concept is incredibly nuanced, therefore representing a sense of collective identity is questionable and something I want to challenge. Another Bangladeshi person’s experience doesn’t completely represent mine, nor does mine represent theirs because of socio-political intersectionality. That being said, we do still share a lot in common as British diaspora with fractured memories, as displayed to us by the recent far right uprisings and anti-immigrant sentiments. A lot of our identities have been homogenised into this concept of other/threat, polarising ideas around British-ness.
I’m interested in ideas of concealing as acts of censorship or preservation, and what information is revealed to the public, whether personal or political. Concealing is inherently part of my existence. We often hear the South Asian diasporic discourse around the notion of “what will so & so think?” so I really wanted to play around with this anxiety and reveal information through analogies and subtle cues. But I didn’t want to “snitch” either, it’s this paradox that sits as the undertone to the show, re-negotiating ideas of public and private.
I also wanted to play around with ideas of concealed spaces such as the home and what information can be gathered around the identity of the inhabitants of a space from reading into aesthetic choices and image based narratives.
In 2018-2024 Photo Album I display photos I’ve taken over the years that have remained in my private archive due to the intimate relationships that those photos carry. The images are obscured in an effort to preserve the memories, while simultaneously, the silhouettes of the subjects in the photos are cut out. I wanted to play around with this kind of violent, yet normalised act of cutting people out of physical images, but replacing them with pixels. I wanted to question the idea of who a memory belongs to and what’s felt during the process of cutting people out, and what information remains, especially once the analogue process undergoes a digital one.
These images are held within a sofa which I classify as a live object, embodied through the memories that it holds through the information carried in each crease, and deflation over time through its transformable quality of intended usage, and varied contact with users.
Installation photo of Durga, Kolkata at Spitalfields Market, 2024
When entering the exhibition space, the first artwork visitors will be confronted with is a banner hanging from the gallery ceiling, and draping to the floor. The photograph depicts a scene from a street market in Durga, Kolkata. Could you share more about this picture and the context in which it was taken, and if you are hoping for this image to set specific emotions or suggestions?
The image was actually taken outside the Durga museum in Kolkata in January 2024, so it was a few months after the spectacular Durga Puja festival. It was the only image I took during my visit that I took with my camera.
I was particularly drawn to the stance of the large-scale sculpture, peeking out from under the dust sheets, and the narrative around when and why it ended up outside. The piece was not necessarily discarded but was also not kept in the best conditions for conservation. A lot of religious (Hindu) sculptures of deities are discarded on the street or through bodies of water once they’ve fulfilled their duties but this one was kept near the exit of the museum, almost as if it was forgotten.
But for me, the visible gaze of the sculpture confronts the spectator and reminds me of the notion of object (im)permanence. Despite being hidden, the object as matter still exists, but the temporality of the object comes into question, especially when considering the lifespan of its sacredness. Having it as the first image you see upon entry sets up a tone around “forgotten” or hidden histories that are visible in plain sight.
In hold me while my mind falters, the acts of holding and being held are central to the piece. Can you expand on the role of physicality and embodiment in your performance and its connection to intimacy and vulnerability? Does love here merge with play – do you think of love as play, and does it matter who is winning?
I believe love should definitely be playful and healing through the child-like behaviours that emerge from vulnerability and safety to reveal oneself. Relationships are a balance of power and submission but I don’t think that there should be a “winner.”
The acts of holding and being held are really prevalent with this work – in relation to the interaction with the cello but also the overall themes of the performance. The first time I performed durationally with the instrument in the previous version of the performance in Lausanne, I wanted to experiment with the potential of sound through a tactile physical exploration of its body, approaching the instrument as a performance artist rather than a musician.
I’m really inspired by the collaborations between Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik. However, the piece that has stuck with me the most was Kim Ku Lim and Nam June Paik’s piano performance – sounds created by the piano through accidental interactions of the feet with the keys during intimacy. I wanted to create a relationship between the naive feelings of exploring intimacy with someone for the first time with exploring the “body” of a cello for the first time, the variations of pace and figuring out live, through praxis, what positions work physically.
Untitled Durational Performance at Les Urbaines, 2024, Photos by Cynthia Ammann
In this performance, you engage with the cello while moving between a plastic-wrapped sofa, a seesaw, and a screen. While your physical movement is confined to a limited space, the sound you create through the cello is unrestricted and ever-changing. How has your approach to sound as a form of language evolved throughout your practice, particularly in the context of improvisation, where meaning and structure are fluid and open to interpretation?
This is the 3rd time I will be using the seesaw in a live performance, each time having a very different element of sound involved in its activation. hold me while my mind falters is the first time I’ll be performing language and prose within my live art practice.
The confinement within physical space is what influenced this idea of presenting a “solo-play,” where usually my live work is action and duration based. In this work, I’ve chosen to include words within this performance, further shaping the performance into a play, in order to experiment with weaving in my less visible writing and poetry practises and create more of a symbiosis within the different artistic forms. I’m combining moving image alongside the live elements and sculptural objects to play around with space and time, navigating rising tension.
Improvisation with sound allows specific tones and frequencies to resonate subjectively with the audience and breaks this idea of musical form because of the ambient noise created through movement and site. Previously I had always chosen to abstain from using language, but sound was always prevalent, even when “silent”.
I’m interested in taking an approach with live sound that’s reactionary rather than composed, straying from the intention of playing decipherable musical notes – as seen in my past performance 0.75/479 Hours where I performed improvised vocals that were processed and distorted by the artist HVAD, in reaction to physical contact made live with melting candle wax at a church in Berlin.
Your Bangladeshi heritage and queerness play a significant role in your work. As both diaspora and queerness often involve navigating complex layers of displacement and fragmentation, how do you weave these elements into your artistic practice?
I think my identity is undeniably visible within my practice because of the unique gaze I depict through the lens, the subject matters, but also my aesthetic and material choices. The blurred and unpinnable references I’ve always had, being British and London-based, made a lot of sense when I went to South Asia. I saw both ancient and contemporary art in the flesh, within different contexts and mostly outside of gallery walls. The art collection in Mumbai airport is really cool.
Being there and travelling around made me realise that not only are some of these references based in visual cultural traditions, but it’s also related to intergenerational relationships with land matter, movement rooted in epigenetics and subconscious interests in certain forms that have existed for centuries.
These are all transformed and represented by complex outputs that are channeled through a funnel of my personal lived experiences, desires and imagination, causing unavoidable fragmentation of pre-existing ideas.
‘Forever, a Lifeline, A Celestial Measure of Time; We Move to Each Other’s Clocks’, 2024, Live Performance at Verses of the Love-Dead, Photos by India Bharadwaj
The exhibition and performance at Whitechapel Gallery are presented in partnership with Oitij-Jo and you’ve collaborated with many artists in your past projects. Can you share how these collaborations have influenced the development of your ideas?
As an interdisciplinary artist, my thought-process is influenced through conversations that emerge and common feelings that are shared and translated in unique ways. Working with other artists has impacted the scope of my physical realisation of ideas, expanding them from a thought in my head, and past the limits of physical dimensions of a sole object, and part of a wider narrative.
It’s been a process of years of researching other artists of South Asian or specifically Bengali identity. I never wanted to be the only one so I’ve really enjoyed collaborating with and curating shows to represent the breadth of uniqueness of our individual voices.
Through my research, I’ve noticed a huge gap in the archives of South Asian Art in the UK so I wanted to start piecing together live history in the making. Archiving isn’t a huge practice in South Asia but in the UK, archives are really important and our histories are prescribed to us through specific school curricula. We didn’t have many artistic references pre 21st-century (a lot of archived history is rooted in anthropological research), which is shocking, considering the first Bengali immigrants landed in the UK in 1700s, and we are one of the largest diasporas in the UK.
The internet is a really amazing place that’s brought upon a beautiful new generation of connectivity, with access to new sources, and the formation of so many collectives.
Looking ahead, do you have any upcoming projects or some exciting work in progress that you can share?
I’ve been exploring photography a lot more, playing around with images, forming narratives or considering them as objects or placeholders, which have the potential of activation, whether through acts of liveness or physical/environmental context.
I like using film specifically for still photography, and arguably the most entry-level form of 35mm point and shoot. I’ve been using the same model of camera for 7-8 years now and have gone through 3 different ones because they’ve all been second-hand and broken over time.
Despite its compromised lifespan, I really enjoy the feeling of chance it carries and the moment of time it captures. That’s not visible until it’s gone through other’s hands and has been developed, unless accidentally exposed to light or physically corrupted in some way. It’s quite similar to working in ceramics and also feels aligned to my live performance practice that is mostly improvised and site-specific, making the work malleable by external factors and partly out of my control. It means that the photo is not only a memoir of physical memories, but also a relic of an emotion that was felt at the time.
