My Dreams, My Works Must Wait Till After Hell, 2011, single-channel digital video, color, sound; 07:14 minutes
Created, directed, & produced by Girl (Simone Leigh + Chitra Ganesh)
After Hell is a video made in collaboration with artist Simone Leigh. “In the video installation, My dreams, my works must wait till after hell… (2011), the title of which derives from a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, a nude female torso is featured lying on her side. Her breathing is amplified both aurally and psychologically as viewers see her ribs expand and contract with each breath, her head obscured under a stack of stones. The video, accompanied by a soundtrack by Kaoru Watanabe, plays with scale, with the torso occupying much of the frame and resembling a mountain buttressed by stones. Against expectations, while the stones weigh like an elaborate headpiece on the most vulnerable part of the body, the figure seems to be sleeping peacefully. Moreover, in animating the figure through performance, she is given life despite the visual overture toward silence, even death.”
——Excerpted from the Radical Presence Exhibition Catalog
