2024

Harmeet Rehal’s ਮੰਜਾ/Manja (Panjabi daybed), honors the often overlooked need for rest among undervalued disabled, racialized, working-class individuals doing what’s thought of as “unskilled” labour. Rehal colorfully transforms milk crates with Panjabi textiles, objects used to transport consumer goods, to hold space for individual and collective relief. These pieces symbolize resistance against a system that values productivity above all else, reminding us of the radical possibilities in imagining space for rest in the most necessary, and unlikely spaces. 

 

In At My Lowest (best worst books only), Sonali Menezes repurposes old self-help books in her sculpture and prints, critiquing the very industry that claims to have all the answers. By transforming these texts, she exposes the hollow promises and one-size-fits-all solutions often peddled by the wellness complex. I can’t afford therapy but I wash my ass, questions expensive self-care rituals and gadgets, shining light on the power in simple actions of care.  

 

moira williams turns to nature, co-creating with wetlands, plants and natural materials in their ancestral Lenapehoking to think about accumulation as a form of interdependence. Their work challenges the individualistic narrative of self-improvement, suggesting that true well-being lies in our relationships to each other and the natural world.

 

Together, these artists invite us to reconsider our impulse for finding improvement through consumption. They ask: In a world that constantly tells us we’re not enough, can we take comfort in what already exists? Can we resist the urge to constantly “fix” ourselves and instead embrace the inherent worth of our interdependence and imperfections?​​

 

At my lowest (best worst books only)

Sometimes I think about the many self-help books and columns I’ve encountered since my tweens. From teen magazines, to the books I browsed at the houses of the women whose children I was babysitting when I was twelve, to the many mental health books I took out from the library or ordered online when I was at my absolute lowest. I hate the writers who promised to make me better and didn’t. I hate that they convinced me that there was something wrong with me that needed fixing just like much of the wellness industry convinces mad people. Can a book really heal my life?

 

I can’t afford therapy but I wash my ass

A lota is a round spouted container used to pour water. My family is from India and I grew up using a lota daily. The method is simple: after you poop, you wash your ass while sitting on the toilet using a lota. It’s the original tushy, a gift from the Global South. The wellness industry which is tied up with capitalism teaches us that we need to buy products and services to take care of ourselves, and if we can’t afford those products or services, we are doing self-care wrong. I say washing my ass every day is the most beautiful act of self-care and love I can offer myself.

 

ਮੰਜਾ/Manjas are Panjabi day beds traditionally made with a simple wooden frame and hand-woven, colourful rope. In contrast to western spatial design, Manjas are found in private and public shared spaces, allowing rest to be collective and ongoing. This piece reimagines the traditional Manja through hand-woven Panjabi textiles and utilitarian milk crates. It attempts to honour the crip, working class, and racialized ritual of finding milk crates in factories, cleaning supply closets, kitchen fridges, alleys, and flea markets and using them as seats and supports to anchor ourselves during shifts. This “access hacking” recalibrates the normative design and purpose of milk crates into a mobility aid. Bounding crates together to form a Manja allows for a more collective mobility aid that creates room for us to relationally rest and spill over.

 

moira williams’ often co-creative work weaves together ritual making and sharing, human and ecological intimacies, and eco-somatics with participatory movement, choreographed walks, gatherings and civic engagements. moira’s ongoing co-creativity with water and people, unsettles ableist and ecological boundaries between bodies by imagining “ecological intimacy” as an expansion of Mia Mingus’ concept of “access intimacy.”

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moira williams’ porous ways of celebrating and being in relationship with their Indigenous and disabled ancestors, with the land and with their constellation of disabilities centers abundance rather than scarcity.

 

Their works and invitations hope to open relational ways of being and thinking that include our bodymind-spirits, multispecies and mutual empathy as ways to break away from colonial technologies and ableisms shaping human relationships, our bodies and land relationships. Their work is co-created with their ancestral and unceded Secatogue lands in Lenapehoking and the beings living there.