An artist and scholar, Panteha Abareshi works across performance, sculptural installation, video, as well as crip critical writing. Their practice explores the complexities of living within a body that is highly monitored, constantly examined, and made to feel like a specimen, critically interrogating the sick/disabled body’s place within medical institutions. Confronting the able-bodied gaze and questioning its dynamics of power, control and objectification, they “abjectify” their own body, using it as material, tearing it from corporeal definition, depriving it of validity.
This radicalized abjectification of the normative corporeal form permeates the following pages. On one hand, a recollection, drawn from a note left by an estranged self under heavy sedation, traces a temporality of rupture, delay, pain, inaccessible memory and institutional erasure. On the other, a closing portfolio of works that retool the visual codes of diagrams, technical graphics, and instructional systems, breaking down representation into seemingly affectless abstraction to register something visceral. Tender yet cruel words and images, exposing how the sick/disabled body is often expected to hold the most painful of positions under the justification of its own care and management.
When I am in the hospital, I make notes and drawings in my notes app. I make this notes while receiving an incredibly sedating and stupefying course of narcotic pain medications, and forget about them completely. These artifacts remain in my notes app for my future self to discover once I have moved from hospital bed back to my domestic sickbed.
This is a quite vulnerable share for me, different than my work that I typically post on here [Editor’s note: Panteha Abareshi’s blog and newsletter entitled Cripple Notions (see panteha.substack.com)], as this is simply a raw excerpt of my hospitalized self and my hospitalized thoughts. This piece of me has not gone through the machine of my practice to emerge on the other side as a finished work. Rather, this is a piece of a version of me that I have no access to. I do not have memories of these moments in the hospital, only the faint traces I etch with tired, pained hand. This particular piece is amongst the most legible, and to me, the most striking.
Typically the artifacts from my hospitalizations are confused words describing my pain, or my fear, or a specific encounter I have had, arranged in a broken rhythm of lines and stanzas. This artifact, which I have absolutely no recollection of creating and no knowledge of what incited it, depicts a “man in a [wheelchair from behind holding balloons]”—as described in my own words. It sends a strange vibration through me when I open my notes app to jot some thought down-laying in my domestic sickbed recovering from hospitalization—only to stumble upon an artifact left for me by my previously hospitalized self. It is a vibration that resonates with both grief, and excitement, and this artifact in particular struck me so deeply, while also sending a pang of a tight, anxious hurt through my being. I am filled with a slight dread as I confront the parts of me that are lost to the hospital—soaked into sheets that will be discarded as medical waste, steeped into blankets and pillows that will be laundered to ensure that every trace of me is gone. And it is gone—that self which felt the urgent need, despite the immobility in its hands, to open the notes app and etch this trace for me to follow. I pull on the frayed, barely-there thread, and it leads to a hollow pit—a quick pull and then a vast nothing. Or, perhaps more aptly, a great well of something which I cannot reach, and which I cannot know. The hospital wouldn’t allow it.
I imagine the incineration of the sheets that held me like fated cradle, blood-soaked, and full of me. It is the cremation of that version of me who made this note, this drawing. I wish I could reach backward inside myself to revisit my state of mind in these moments, but I know that I can’t. It’s as though my mind in the hospital writes itself in a language of signs, symbols and sigils which I cannot comprehend. The traces, the artifacts which are left behind are those slivers which break through the barrier, barely comprehensible most of the time.
“Drawing of a man [wheelchair from behind holding balloons]” haunts me. I cannot stop contemplating what I could have seen to inspire the drawing, isolated and immobile in my hospital bed. Is it some portrait of a figure I briefly saw when being pushed haphazardly in my bed from my room to the MRI machine? Was it some dream, some hallucination? It is a futile and exhausting endeavor, and it feels as though I am attempting to decipher the thoughts of a complete stranger.
And perhaps I am.
For that hospitalized self is strange. It is unfamiliar.
It is so far away from me. Gone, gone, gone.