Much love i leave behind

The gallery has the big light on. There are three foil balloons next to three chairs. I am sat in the crowd, wearing a black fur coat and an opalescent party hat. I think it’s my 6th birthday. I can’t believe the big light is on! Someone hit the switch and bring out the cake — a big square vanilla slab covered in fresh cream icing and fruit. HAPPY BIRTHDAY ! ! Written in curly cursive milk chocolate letters. It is 2000, I am 6 years old, I am a big girl! I can do joined up handwriting, so someone has got me a diary. It has a glittery heart on the front and a padlock on the side. I will write secrets in my diary. Its pages are pink and the lines are massive. I will write my secrets in my diary, yeah. No one can look at my diary! It’s secret. I also got glittery gel pens, smelly gel pens, and a pen with a snowglobe insert — little fish swim up and down the blue liquid of my biro. It’s my birthday :) <3 Good presents. I can’t wait for the cake!

I am in the gallery, Indigo + Madder, for Athen Kardashian and Nina Mhach Durban’s exhibition: Much love I leave behind. The gallery has a little courtyard boxed in by a window. It’s like an open air vitrine, only a couple meters wide. I can’t stop glancing over at it, the most enigmatic artwork is locked away inside. A pile: tins of alphonso mango pulp, kesar, rubicon fizzy mango, lychee drinks in screw cap bottles. All of it is in bulk, plastic wrapped, from the cash and carry. The pile is like an offering, propping up an image: a massive blown up print of a postcard from New York, iconic 90s skyline (complete with twin towers) from across the water. The postcard sky is so blue and so big. The postcard image is so sticky and shiny, laminated or plastic wrapped, trapped air bubbles and creases blistering across the buildings. It’s like a weird shrine, not for a god or anything that monumental. A shrine for something small, secret, an image spirit, a discrete image language.

Half of my aunt’s kitchen is carpeted, the other half is tiled. Her fridge is on the carpeted half. For as long as I can remember it has been covered in kitschy ceramic magnets from the places she’s been on holiday: Rome, Mallorca, Crete, Tenerife. A square tile from Lisbon, a blue evil eye from Marmaris, a red apple with a chunky bite mark from New York (her 40th wedding anniversary). One year my cousins went on holiday without her and they sent her back a postcard — two old ladies in neon swimming costumes lounging on the beach. That’s been on her fridge since before I was even alive. It is soft around the edges, its corners are rounded. It has been bleached by the sun and wrinkled.

The lights stay on. It is Valentines Day. The artists, Athen and Nina, are in conversation with Dal Chodha. Mostly I am listening, taking notes, nodding silently. But then there is a small part of me that is thinking about that blown up postcard in the courtyard vitrine.

I think it is funny and sweet: the way families hold onto images, the kinds of images they hold onto. The images that decorate our homes, our fridges, our lives. They are so different to the images I spend my professional life thinking and writing about, the images we put in galleries and museums. But those family images are the kinds of images we have all built lasting, emotional relationships with! They have cluttered up my image imagination, well before I ever got to Reubens, Bacon or Mondrian. Before I even knew that art existed, I knew that those two old ladies were lounging on the beach in their neon swimming cozzies. Before the museum or the gallery, there was Mala masi’s fridge, on the carpeted half of her kitchen. These family images are relegated to the internal secrecy of our childhoods, our family systems, our immigrant bootstrap origin story. Yes, yes, I went to art school and cut myself loose from these childish things! I write art criticism for a website, I visit galleries and think intellectual thoughts about art’s conceptual turn — I have no time for sentimentality! But I am also 6 years old, fish swimming in my biro, rearranging magnets and writing secrets in my pink diary with the glittery heart.

When it rains, will the print in the courtyard start disintegrating? Will the ink run and bleed and — I love it when you see laminated posters on outdoor noticeboards and the colours have gone all watery and sunbleached. I love it when something looks authentically weathered. That never happens to Reubens, Bacon or Mondrian! These important, revered images never feel the touch of time. Maybe the postcard print will dissolve entirely. Just fizz away like a bathbomb or a urinal cake, loveheart candy, we are here to witness its demise and this is a temporal thing.

Some images are private, some are public. Some are revered, some are circulated, some are put to use — but is the reverence private or public? Is the reverence a savouring sentimentality? Or is it highbrow, universal, in relation to the grand canon of art history? In this context (a commercial gallery full of contemporary art) the postcard in the courtyard is both. The artists are using found images, found objects, found materials — stuff that speaks to this private sentimental reverence — they blow it up to make it palpable, cartoonish, inescapable. It is recreating the thing from within, conditioning it into something that feels like contemporary art (that monumental god), but isn’t entirely. Maybe half and half. Half contemporary art, half carpet, half tile. Half monument to the small image spirits that live on the surface of every family fridge. A shrine for the shared image language of Gujurati aunties in Harrow.