Interview with Janhavi Khemka
Colette Copeland
August 2024
Mix media Installation:सुबह का इंतजार, Waiting for the Dawn, Mera Kamra l (03:57 min), A Letter to My Mother (03:33 min), Mera Kamra ll (01:40 Min), 5-6 color woodcut prints, stop-motion animation using woodcut prints, Projection on the wall and platform, Vibration bass, AMP, wire and plywood platform, Three Channel video, 2024, photo courtesy of Arpita Akhanda
I first discovered Janhavi Khemka’s work at the India Art Fair in Delhi last February. I’ve written about my frustration with art fairs and yet her work was one of the highlights of the show. Nestled inside a curtained-off darkened room was a 3-channel projected installation of her project Waiting for the Dawn. Sourcing from personal narratives, Khemka’s overall theme speaks to overcoming obstacles including fear. Her work challenges viewers to reconsider their experiences with art and the world through tactile sensation and alternative perspectives. This work will be including in an upcoming exhibition at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2025. The interview was conducted via email exchange.
Colette Copeland: Waiting for the Dawn is a compilation of four projects that you’ve merged together as one large-scale installation. Your personal life experiences including growing up with a hearing impairment, your mother teaching you to lip-read, her subsequent death from cancer and your challenges during covid where lip-reading wasn’t possible due to masks all come together in this multi-faceted work. Trained as a master woodcut printmaker, your prints always figure prominently in your work. Please explain the evolution from 2-D prints to stop-motion animation and how you incorporate your woodcuts into this work.
Janhavi Khemka: Woodcut is my preferred medium; it gives me strength and comfort in my creative journey. When I started exploring the textures in the paintings of my favorite artist Van Gogh through woodcut, I noticed a lot of movement and energy in his style. However, my prints seemed flat and silent, lacking the dynamic quality I admired in Van Gogh’s work. I thought creating animation with woodcut prints was impossible, but then I joined the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to learn animation.
Under the guidance of my mentors Christopher Sullivan and Joel Benjamin, I learned the techniques of animation with patience and dedication. I started to experiment with drawing and painting for animation, and eventually, I started printing with woodcut for animation. However, I faced a new challenge—I couldn’t hear the sound, which is an essential aspect of animation. I then met a hard-of-hearing artist, Joseph Grigely, who introduced me to a deaf artist from Amsterdam— Adi Hollander. Through email conversations, Adi taught me how to use sound and vibration in my work.
Inspired by this newfound knowledge, I created a performance piece, Your Name, please? incorporating vibration. I realized that I could translate vibration into audio, allowing me to “hear” the sound through vibration while creating animation software. My mentor Joel helped me analyze sound waves, enabling me to understand the nuances of loud and quiet sounds. For instance, I used the sound of drums to convey the stormy clouds, as both drumbeats and thunderstorms evoke similar vibrations.
With this understanding, I continued working on animation, finding joy and satisfaction. I combined my woodcut prints with stop-motion animation, creating a unique and immersive experience.
Your name, please? Plywood platform, vibration, mics and AMP, 2022,
performance 33:08 minutes, photo courtesy of Mikey Mosher
CC: The domestic space as a contested site plays a dominant role in Waiting for Dawn. In Mera Kamra I (My Room 1), the bedroom is a place of anxiety and fear rather than a place of comfort and safety. The work references the darkness and silence of night and inability to hear danger. In Mera Kamra II (My Room 2), the cupboard and the sink serve as vessels for grief as you cared for your ailing mother. Please expand on the themes of danger, safety, and embodied memories within the domestic landscape in this work.
JK: In Mera Kamra I (My Room 1), I drew upon my personal experience as a deaf individual living alone in a Chicago apartment while pursuing my master’s at SAIC. Despite informing my neighbors about my deafness, they often reacted angrily to unintentional noise, such as washing utensils or knocking on the door, which made me feel scared, isolated, and anxious. The fear of not receiving warnings or alerts, unlike my hearing counterparts, constantly lingered in my mind and body. The story of Chicago’s Great Fire, where people died in their sleep, exacerbated my sense of vulnerability. These emotions and experiences are embodied in my work, reflecting the domestic space as a site of anxiety and fear rather than comfort and safety.
In Mera Kamra II (My Room 2), I revisited my childhood home, where my mother struggled with breast cancer. The cupboard and sink served as vessels for grief, as I cared for her and witnessed her pain. However, this piece also explores my daily routine and the significance of my eyes as a deaf individual. I use my eyes to read lips, facial expressions, and sign language, which can be exhausting. The animation work allowed me to creatively express the emotional toll of these experiences and imagine the next frame, symbolizing the embodiment of memories within the domestic landscape.
CC: I’m interested in your ongoing work with sound, interactivity and performance. In A Letter to My Mother, you incorporate sound vibrations into the floor platform so that viewers can experience sound using touch. Siri’s Here To Help is a performative piece that shows the frustration of communication in an ableist society. In Your name, please? performance, you expand upon this theme as you perform with another individual allowing them to feel vibrational soundwaves as you practice sounding their name. Please share your experiences using performance as a tool to shift dominant suppositions surrounding hearing impairment. One sentence in your bio resonated strongly with me—how you look at disability not as a disadvantage, but as a lens with which you can understand and negotiate the world through different perspectives.
JK: I didn’t learn sign language growing up. Instead, my family communicated with me in Hindi through lip reading, which my mother taught me. However, I struggled in school due to a lack of access for deaf individuals. When COVID-19 happened, it was the hardest part of my life due to the mask and being unable to read lips. We had to rely on notes or typing on mobile devices to communicate.
When I moved to the U.S. for my master’s during the pandemic, I faced new challenges in my room and communicating in a new language (English) through lip reading. For instance, when someone says the word “money”, I struggle to distinguish it from “monkey” due to similar lip movements. Additionally, I wasn’t able to use sign language. Fortunately, my school provided an interpreter and captioner to aid my studies.
During my MFA program, my mentor Magalie Guérin assigned a task to create a manifesto video inspired by Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance of Sol Lewitt’s letter to Eva Hesse. I created my own video, Siri’s Here to Help, as a response to this task, highlighting my experiences as a deaf individual and challenging the dominant assumptions about hearing impairment. Through this video, I aimed to show the world that “I am deaf, but I am not mute”.
Due to the mask mandate, I struggled to pronounce people’s names correctly. For instance, when someone’s name is ‘Jason’, I would say ‘Sason’ or ‘Sajon’, which was confusing. To address this, I created a performance with the artist Adi, where I learned to feel vibrations and allowed the audience to teach me their names. This was incredibly beneficial, as after the performance, the audience understood how to communicate with me more effectively. Now, they speak to me in slow motion, remove their masks, or wear clear masks to help me lip-read.
Letter to My Mother holds a special place in my heart. My mother taught me to speak through lip reading and vibration by touching our throats on a mat at home. After she passed away, I continued practicing in front of the mirror, longing to speak in front of her once more. I had written a letter to her but struggled to find closure. By combining woodcut print animation and vibration sound, I created Letter to My Mother and recorded my speech, incorporating the vibration into the platform. I believe that only my mother would truly understand my words in a way no one else can.
CC: As you know, my Fulbright research centers on borders and boundaries—physical, emotional, imagined and real. How does your work explore these themes?
JK: As I mentioned, I was born in India and am now based in Chicago. My journey has been transformative, exploring borders and boundaries that are not just physical but also emotional and imagined. Growing up in India, I was surrounded by a supportive family who protected and guided me.
However, moving to the USA was a pivotal moment that forced me to navigate new challenges and discover my own identity. At first, I struggled with self-awareness, communication, and building relationships. I also had to confront the deeply ingrained stigma surrounding disability within my psyche, which also sometimes made me question my identity as a deaf person.
But my experiences in the art field have been a game-changer. Taking my disability as my strength, I’ve discovered that art can be a powerful tool for self-expression and empowerment. Through my art, I’ve learned to communicate in new ways, using vibration and visual elements to connect with others. I’ve also learned to appreciate my senses uniquely.
As a deaf person, my visual and tactile senses are heightened, and I’ve discovered that vibration is my music and visual is my sound. I can play them together in perfect harmony.
One memorable experience that stands out is when I met someone who took me to sit in front of a piano and played music for me. I felt the vibrations through the piano’s surface, and it was like my heart was singing. At that moment, I realized that I didn’t have to hide or apologize for my disability, and my path to acceptance began.
Through my journey, I’ve learned to break free from societal constraints and embrace my true self. I hope my work continues to inspire me and others to understand and connect with the world.
CC: What are you most excited about right now in your art practice?
JK: I’m thrilled to share that I’m currently inspired by the story of Chicago’s Great Fire and planning a visit to the Shedd Aquarium to observe octopuses and jellyfish. These experiences will inform my new body of work in woodcut print and animation. I’m eager to capture the city’s soundscape, including the train, cars, and vehicles on the bridge, as well as the wind. To further enrich the project, I plan to collaborate with drummers and violinists to create an immersive soundscape.
As part of her Fulbright Research Award in India, Colette Copeland has been doing a series of interviews with socially engaged artists whose work explores themes of borders and boundaries.
Interview with Aditi Aggarwal →
Interview with Vishnupriya Rajgarhia →
Interview with Hiten Noonwal →
Interview with Parvathi Nayar →
Interview with Manmeet Devgun →
Interview with Moutushi Chakraborty →
Interview with Riti Sengupta →
Interview with Jyotsna Siddharth →
Interview with Mallika Das Sutar →
Colette Copeland is an interdisciplinary visual artist, arts educator, social activist and cultural critic/writer whose work examines issues surrounding gender, death and contemporary culture. Sourcing personal narratives and popular media, she utilizes video, photography, performance and sculptural installation to question societal roles and the pervasive influence of media, and technology on our communal enculturation.
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