The whirring motor sound emanates from an unusual contraption. A linear aluminum-rail system is attached to the wall, a vertical glint of silver adrift in an expanse of white. From this structure flows long, draping wires connected to what looks like a makeshift circuit-breaker box. Another wire creeps up the length of the wall. And affixed to the right side of the aluminum rail is a severed, animatronic arm, a Frankenstein’s monster–like grotesquerie of Arduino hardware and other machinery. The arm holds its own prop: in its pale fingers is a wooden broom. Below all this is a platform across which lies a bamboo silk and wool rug with flowering blooms and geometric motifs, though one corner of the textile is pulled a few inches off the ground by a thread. The textile has a cartographic shape, and standing in front of it, I felt like I was looking at an ornate illustration of a place. There was an eeriness to this installation, a sensation that grew and mutated once I realized that the textile is in the shape of post-Partition India.
When I arrived at Night Gallery in Los Angeles and entered the first room of Divya Mehra’s exhibition, The End of You, the arm had begun a slow, agonizing journey across the rail. It was wired to do one action, seemingly without end, and that is to sweep under the rug. Once near the uprooted textile, the arm lurches with life to wobbly clean the shadowy space between it and the textile for a few seconds, before returning to its neutral state and retreating along the rail. Upon first glance, I had an impulse to laugh at the dry absurdity of this piece, titled You’re Doing The Work (Diamond Jubilee) (2024). But on further examination, the parenthetical aside in the title brought to mind the 1897 Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, who was monarch during the first forty-three years of British imperial rule in India. During this period, British colonizers reenergized the Indian carpet industry, fueling the demand for ornate, handwoven rugs in Britain. To satisfy this inflated need, the British Raj began exploiting the labor of Indian prisoners. In 1877, people incarcerated in the Agra prison wove what was believed at the time to be the largest seamless rug, which was presented as a gift to Queen Victoria for her Golden Jubilee, when she became the “Empress” of India. The pageantry of this milestone, and the violence of British presence in general, is undercut by this skit between the arm and the rug. Slyly, Mehra reiterates how the Partition of India was a consequence of British imperial rule, whose policies encouraged antagonism and divisions along religious lines that still reverberate today. Britain has yet to take accountability for its role, and instead seems to have washed its hands of the matter.
Divya Mehra, You’re Doing the Work (Diamond Jubilee), 2024. Courtesy Night Gallery. Photo: Nik Massey.
Mehra’s work has this effect: one minute you believe you’re in on the joke, and the next minute you’re disassembled, caught up in the ways that the ghosts of colonialism and white supremacy continue to shape our environments and experiences. For more than a decade, Mehra has used drawing, performance, text, sculpture, video, and other forms to materialize these ghosts. And though her work is known for its biting humor, she considers this aspect an initial “layer,” to which she adds other elements “right under/over it,” as she explained in an interview with Hyperallergic. I will split up my Father’s empire (after NWA) (2011), an early neon sculpture, pairs Gandhi’s winking face with revised lyrics from an N. W. A song, in which the promise of “bloodshed” conjures the violence of Partition in unnerving ways. This folding over of the personal into the historical into pop culture allows the artist to play with different emotional registers—one way of parsing the ongoing effects of British colonialism. For Mehra, colonialism is a kind of doomsday logic, where the destruction of other people, cultures, and lands is cloaked under the guises of discovery, benevolent aid, or protection. Her work rips those guises, as in A Practical Guide (2023), a large inflatable of a plastic to-go bag with the word LOOT emblazoned repeatedly on the front, followed by the phrase “Have a nice day.”
The End of You contends with different experiences of the end, from the Partition of India to the Covid-19 pandemic, by constantly questioning what it means to move through the aftermaths of historical catastrophes, to continue on despite the end of the world as you know it. “A ghost mutates through intensity, gathering enough energy to touch you through your thin blouse, or your legging, or your scarf,” Bhanu Kapil writes in Schizophrene (2011), a book-length poem that tries to contend with the psychosomatic experience of the displacement of migration in Indian and Pakistani diasporic communities. Ghosts abound in Mehra’s exhibition and enact a similar kind of touch. As I moved through the gallery, encountering neon text and an enormous inflatable that took up much of the second room, it was hard to shake the feeling of being surrounded by other presences that gathered meaning in the silences and gaps between the works.
Divya Mehra, here at least we shall be free (build yourself a Taj Mahal for common folks OR a simple set for funniest home video), 2021. Courtesy Night Gallery. Photo: Martin Elder.
The End of You borrows its title from a series of postcards Mehra began in 2020 for the California College of the Arts Wattis Institute in San Francisco. In these drawings, fuchsia mushroom clouds blossom in the background as white people obliviously go about their shopping, drinking, and TV-watching. Within these scenes, only the brown and Black people seem to notice the impending doom. Inspired by cartoonist Skip Morrow’s 1983 book The End, the series torques the meanings of apocalypse. The titles in these works double as thought bubbles, as in “You’re just a doorman, I know the owner.” (2024). The line hangs over the scene of an impatient patron in line to enter the “Office of Accountability” who is being ignored by the person working concierge in a stupor. Joining him in line is a ghost, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from the Ghostbusters franchise and Waldo from the Where’s Waldo? books. Inside the building, an elderly person naps contently in a chair across from a sign that reads, “You’re not the problem!” Mehra packs so much in her sardonic images; in this case, she lampoons the shallow invocations of accountability, which tends to be more focused on assuaging white guilt than having honest conversations about systemic racism, oppression, and how the legacies of imperialism continue to disrupt marginalized communities and their sense of home and belonging.
Divya Mehra, Landscape Painting, 2024. Courtesy Night Gallery. Photo: Nik Massey.
We’re Ready to Believe You! (2024), for example, is an arch reassemblage of the violence of whiteness. Splayed across the gallery floor, a thirteen-foot inflatable version of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, a humanoid character composed of stacks of spongy confections, seems to have toppled from a great height. Its right arm reaches out in desperation, while its face is plastered to the floor, unseen. I kept circling its unwieldy form, and at times my body felt enmeshed with the suspended white nylon. In the 1984 Ghostbusters film, this marshmallow logo reappears in the film’s climax as the final paranormal monster, a physical manifestation of an apocalyptic deity. We’re Ready to Believe You! obliquely confronts this imperial logic, imagining a slapstick fantasy where this manifestation of whiteness falls flat on its face. As with most of her titles, the text provides a mordant punchline, recalling the ways that these traumas are dismissed as figments of brown and Black people’s imagination.
Divya Mehra, We’re Ready to Believe You!, 2024. Courtesy Night Gallery. Photo: Nik Massey.
In a review of Schizophrene for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Andrea Quaid writes that Kapil’s book “illuminates how a historical trauma, like a personal one, can have lasting effects that refuse to be contained in a singular time and place.” These effects can transmute into ghosts that rupture a sense of past, present, future. Mehra’s previous show at Night Gallery, The Funny things You do (2021), presented two massive inflatables of the wave and urn emoji, which took up much of the gallery’s outdoor courtyard. Created in the wake of her father’s death, the project struck a quieter chord despite its size, as it meditated on the artist’s own personal encounters with ghostly presences. These spectral energies also animate The End of You, bending time, place, and space through its engagement with the oppressive systems that overdetermine our sense of being and relationality.
