Duration - 2hours 08minutes
In A Weight That Named Me, Aparna engages the act of assembly as a sustained, ritualised gesture through which inherited histories are made materially present. The performance unfolds through the repetitive threading of pearls into a growing garland, transforming an object traditionally associated with adornment into a critical instrument of inquiry.
Rooted in Aparna’s ongoing investigation of cultural expectation and individual identity, the work reflects on the specific pressures placed upon women within patriarchal societies, particularly through the lens of her Indian heritage. In contexts where feminine worth is often tethered to compliance with prescribed roles, ornamentation becomes both symbol and structure. Here, the pearl operates as a charged material. Historically extracted through violence from oceans and living bodies, it carries within it legacies of colonial trade, commodification, and the fabrication of desirability.
As the durational action progresses, accumulation becomes central. The lengthening garland is not merely decorative but cumulative, holding the weight of memory, social conditioning, and intergenerational expectation. The performer’s body becomes an active site of inscription, simultaneously assembling and bearing the burden of these layered narratives. The labour is deliberate and unhurried, foregrounding endurance as both aesthetic strategy and political stance.
Rather than offering nostalgia or reverence toward tradition, A Weight That Named Me stages a reckoning. It interrogates the seductive surface of beauty and exposes the systems that manufacture and sustain it. The gesture of threading becomes ambivalent: an act that appears devotional yet carries within it the potential for refusal. When the same hands that construct the garland are also implicated in the structures that bind them, labour shifts from passive compliance toward conscious confrontation.
Through slowness, repetition, and material symbolism, Aparna renders visible the persistent afterlife of empire and patriarchy within contemporary bodies. The work asks not only how identity is assembled, but who is required to carry its weight.