In Koshur – the Kashmiri language – the metaphors of pain invoke sky, earth, mountains, fire, sounds, textures, smells, colours, erasure, departure, and objects like knife, axe, saw, nails. Artist Rollie Mukherjee's work is a home to these metaphors. Through her paintings she evokes the geography, the body, the edifices of pain. Her work is not only pain in translation but the body in pain itself. Pain exists as a paradox: it is ephemeral yet it renders everything else insignificant. It is irretrievable yet it leaves a trace. But like pain itself, its trace is equally enigmatic. It finds a home in memory even though, as scientists now debate, memory itself doesn't have a home. The question is do we enter the sovereign territory of pain or is it the pain that enters us? If the latter is true, then isn't the familiar expression I am in pain, a betrayal of our sensorial experience, the pain is in me? In Koshur, pain is borne or possessed as is observable in the expression mei cha dagh (a literal rough translation would be: "I have pain"), or dagh lalnawaan (cradling/bearing the ache or pain). Pain asserts its sovereignty over the body but simultaneously evokes a longing in the body, for freedom. It may appear otherwise but a body in pain is undeniably alive; pain is a sign of life.
Mukherjee's work gives way to these transactions, conversations, interactions and relationships between body, longing, language and pain.