Devika Sundar

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will examine the complex and elusive quality of women-specific pain and subjective patient experience vis-à-vis standardised diagnostic testing and normative clinical procedures. Devika Sundar is the Coordinator for this project.   

Devika Sundar is an artist and writer based in Bangalore. She attempts to map and negotiate the idea of belonging within a body that is often in transition or dissonance with oneself, through her work. Exploring conflicting tension and curiosity with medicine’s visualisation of the body, her work traces boundaries of medical imaging, examining the underlying, hidden obscurities and ambiguities of our interior environments. In 2018, Devika presented her exhibition, Essentially Normal Studies around invisible illnesses, as a keynote speaker at MYOPAIN, an international medical conference organised by the Indian MYOPAIN Society – a chapter of the International Myopain Society. In 2020, she shared the project as an interdisciplinary guest lecture at Ashoka University. Devika received the Fine Art Award from Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation in 2020 and a Prince Clause Fund Seed Award in 2021. Devika’s experience with fibromyalgia and her artistic engagement with the female body make her a suitable Coordinator for this project. 

The female body exists as a complex, conflicted and culturally coded site of experience. In India, female-specific pain, illness and experience are routinely dismissed, misdiagnosed and stigmatised as psychosomatic, erratic and emotionally rooted within larger patriarchal medical spheres. 

This project will draw from Devika’s lived experience with fibromyalgia and seven years of dismissal, misinformation and misdiagnosis by predominantly male doctors and healthcare professionals. It will examine the complex and elusive quality of female-specific pain and subjective patient experience against standardised diagnostic testing and normative clinical procedures. It will explore why symptoms of poorly understood invisible conditions such as Lyme disease, endometriosis, fibromyalgia and complex autoimmune illnesses that predominantly affect the female population are routinely missed or negated amongst primary care physicians and medical and healthcare professionals. The project intends to unpack, explore and extend the inquiry through gathering and documenting shared experiences around female-specific illness and pain, drawing from personal narratives of women Devika has met and encountered in her journey, within her family, extended circles and through online communities.    

Exploring normative diagnostic language, procedures and tools used to measure illness and pain, the project will trace the hidden and layered areas of subjective experiences that lie behind the dictated frames, markers, and categorisations. It will explore how these experiences could translate toward a dissonant and dissociative relationship with one’s identity and sense of self, acknowledging the complex intersectionality of gender identity, class, caste, sexuality and age while examining the dysphoria that can accompany these experiences. 

Threading together personal voices of female-specific experiences of illness, dysphoria and disability, the project will employ different artistic research methodologies, including recording oral histories, conducting workshops, journaling, writing, photography, drawing, printmaking, and moving image explorations. Secondary research will explore selected archives from articles, research papers, medical journals, Indian medical textbooks and manuscripts, tracing how the female body has been studied, written, mapped and visualised in allopathy, Ayurveda and homoeopathy.

The outcomes of this project will be an artist book, a series of mixed media and multi-sensorial artworks and a virtual journal documenting the journey of the project. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be a copy of the artist book, visual documentation of the artworks and a link to the virtual journal.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme in the manner in which it intends to study shared experiences around female-specific illness and pain women that are often both ignored and silenced in society, by drawing from personal narratives and experiences of women. 

IFA will ensure that the project is implemented on time and the funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is complete and deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with the Trustees.

This project is supported by BNP Paribas India.