Between the Waves is a 5-channel video installation first presented at dOCUMENTA (13), and is presented here as two channels and a collage from the larger installation. For this project, Shah creates sensual, poetic, heterotopic landscapes within which they place subjects that inhabit personal/ political metaphors – embodiments of the queer, eco-sexual, inter-special, technological, spiritual and scientific.

Channel II – Landfill Dance functions as an epilogue in the installation. Set in the future of the long past, it imagines a possible scope of what remains. The landfill is one kind of an archeological site of the future, they are an accumulation of our refuse that are sometimes transformed by structures built on top of them. By contrast, Channel IV – Moon Burning explores a more durational encounter, a symbolic disintegration of a celestial presence. Between the Waves – Inner splits our worldview into two – sky/earth, overground/ underground, outer/inner. The shapes and forms in this duality seem to mirror each other, echoing the Vedic or Hermetic adage, “As above, so below.” This understanding of the micro and the macro has important significance in reading the artist’s work. The megapolis of Bombay, a large part of which is sitting on reclaimed land, filled with debris and garbage, has been the artist’s domicile for about 15 years.

The artist avoids using personal pronouns as an experiment and expression of retirement from gender conformity.