LURU Hangs w/ Interdisciplinary Artist Devika Sundar

Art does more than render the unseen into the seen.

Bengaluru artist Devika Sundar’s practice is powered by her experiences of living with fibromyalgia, “a chronic, invisible condition that affects one’s nervous system.” Sundar’s condition doesn’t have any visual markers or signifiers; “it’s hard to diagnose because it doesn’t surface on conventional, standardised, diagnostic tests like X-rays and MRIs,” she tells Luru in her first-floor home–studio, tucked under the knobbly canopy of a giant raintree.

She says these diagnostic tools “often reveal structural abnormalities,” like broken bones, slipped discs, and muscle tears. But fibromyalgia “gets dismissed or misdiagnosed” because it isn’t perceptible. Devika lived through “seven or eight years” of not knowing what was really going on, going from one doctor to the next, getting numerous scans on her body while dealing with “very confusing symptoms.”

Art and soul

Through those many years of not knowing, each of Devika’s scans would come back with the diagnostic impression: “essentially normal study”. This pithy, practical response to her chronic pain condition went on to become the title of one of Devika’s early works: Essentially Normal Studies.

In this set, she “layers, draws over, and embeds eight years of medical scans” as an attempt to “negotiate” with her condition. She would print out sections of her X-rays and use a white ink pen to “rewrite and draw over it.” For Devika, this process of playing around with medical documents wasn’t a way of “making the pain visible but negotiating the tensions and conflicts between invisibility, physicality, what is seen, and what is unseen.” Essentially Normal Studies was also a way of “challenging the sterility of the scans” through paint, ink, and colour. Even her medium of choice — transparent sheets — “mimicked” the medical process of detection “when held against the light”; it also imitated the doctoral gesture of writing illegibly on these scans. Across the work, Devika peppers the phrase “you don’t look sick” — an accusation often thrown at people living with fibromyalgia.

Does this idea have legs?

While Devika’s work has a playful spontaneity, it grows from research on Western and Eastern medical systems. She builds the vocabulary of her practice through explorations and experimentations in the pages of her numerous, colourful, striking journals. She proceeds to flip through the open journals on her table, showing us “various stages tracking different projects.” Journalling has become a “central part” of Devika’s practice, providing her with a “safe space to sit with and negotiate with ideas that are circulating, the readings and emotions being processed internally.” Over the years, she has come to “need that space, sometimes even six months of playing in these pages” before beginning a new piece of work. “It becomes an archive of thoughts, visuals, text, research, textures, material” of that period, she explains.

Returning to her journals sometimes sparks new work — like Bodies At Sea, which came from suddenly seeing “the visual synergy and parallels in texture between sea creatures and the human body,” she says, pointing to a page in her journal affixed with a photograph of a stingray and a medical textbook graphic of a uterus.

Devika’s practice offers a lived opposition to the purely medical understanding of our bodies. Instead, her work reminds us that our bodies are fluid, fun, and free. Follow her practice here.

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LURU Hangs with... is a monthly Luru Newsletter series which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.