Filmmaker-artist Paromita Vohra’s new installation urges to not shy away from pleasures aural and oral | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Filmmaker-artist Paromita Vohra’s new installation urges to not shy away from pleasures aural and oral | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Written by Tanushree Ghosh |Updated: December 3, 2019 8:26:51 am

Filmmaker-artist Paromita Vohra’s new installation urges to not shy away from pleasures aural and oral

Mumbai-based Vohra, whose online sex-education portal ‘Agents of Ishq’ turns four this month, says, “We are sanitising sexual culture either through woke censoriousness or cultural morality.”

The electronic installation that travelled to Delhi and Kolkata, recently, as part of Goethe-Institut’s year-long ‘Five Million Incidents’ series of art projects, is an exercise in self-reflection.

It wouldn’t have been outlandish to emerge from Paromita Vohra’s immersive installation, A Love Latika, singing RD Burman’s Samundar mein nahake aur bhi namkeen ho gayi ho. The light emanating from a corner — separated by diaphanous net curtains, in the pitch-black Max Mueller Bhavan in Delhi — is the voice of reason that society would rather leave in the dark. Inside, a tetraptych of four wall-mounted, flat-screen TVs, connected with headphones and a mouse, has a latika (long vine/creeper) — a “heterogeneity of desire”, out of a colouring book — running through it. Wild, uncontrollable, growing in all directions in “an electronic forest of erotic verse”, with its many flowers and fruits, a butterfly, a suspicious-looking bird, and a plant eating a fish. One feels awashed and enriched.