The Sanatorial #5 – Vijay Masharani
A monthly Q&A on illness & practice
Welcome to The Sanatorial, a Q&A with artists and writers about fantasies of the sanatorium and the relationship between illness and practice.
Last week I was in Milan and lucky enough to coincide with Sequin, Shadow, a solo exhibition by Vijay Masharani at Clima. I’ve followed Vijay’s work and writing online since meeting him in Glasgow a few years ago, but this was my first time getting to see it in person. The gallery is set back from the street, tucked into a green and quiet residential courtyard. Inside, a series of intricate pencil drawings line the space, interspersed with videos on wall-mounted iPads. At first glance the work seems preoccupied with geometry — columns, arches, stars and circles function as recurring motifs — yet each drawing develops variations and embellishments which, taken together, become figuratively suggestive (I want to say: ulterior). The forms might be lighthouses, portals, surveillance tools, migraine auras; sometimes they appear to embody a reluctant pronoun, an ‘i’ that leaks into its background, as in the histopathology sample-esque Red drawing, or the void-like grey of Ocean of Despair. Elsewhere they are almost legible as bodies, as in Visitation, where three figures appear to bend towards a fourth, like a nativity scene, or visitors around a hospital bed. What is and isn’t legible as body, and where the body is or isn’t in the work, is an open question. The single channel video Mask permutations is a mise-en-scène of various objects placed on and around a white thermoplastic radiotherapy mask. As the video cycles, medical training props of cross-sectioned hearts and bones appear on the mask’s ‘face’, where a hole seems to melt and spread into the shape of a mouth. It’s a face without a face, a disembodied quotation of ‘the body’ or its medicalised alienation, uncanny and unsettling. If the visitor happens to have read ‘Not Nothing, Not Enough’ — an essay by Masharani in Parapraxis, as I have — they may know that the artist is a Leukemia patient; yet the gallery text makes no reference to illness, or the context of the works’ making. Before I saw the show, Vijay and I spoke over email about how the disclosure of sickness can overdetermine the reception of one’s work, and about opacity and refusal. In the Parapraxis essay Vijay writes ‘I do not feel like a narrative subject at all anymore, but an unstable bundle of cells, some of which are deviant and trying to kill me.’ The drawings’ fading-out ‘i’s in a sea of cells might be biological realism, or a refusal to self-narrate — as per the individualised illness narrative — but they might also be a reckoning with the patient’s complicated place in, and reliance on, a medical system totally vulnerable to capitalism’s whims and sadisms. As Vijay puts it in an incredible collage sequence below, ‘Figuring all this out has never been immediately profitable.’
— DL
Your ideal sanatorium
A typical day when you’re not flaring - A typical day when you’re flaring
Not flaring — studio, writing, teaching; correspondence with friends not present; walks. Occasionally I’ll see exhibitions. Flaring — treatment; bed; phone; impatience
Relationship to diagnosis
It already won “I’m” submerged after the victory tide I prefer not to afford it exceptional status I don’t like the suffer-because-chosen-chosen-because-suffer-merry-go-round of history maybe for a few years it’s a slight anamorphosis of vision that will peter out
The metaphor or analogy most often invoked to explain your condition
A fight. Heavily critiqued for its paucity, it works anyway the hematologist balls his fists like after O.J. got off I square up too it will have an outcome
Collage assets by Vijay Masharani
Layouts and typesetting by Caleb Ali Miller
Typeset in Beaujon by Programme
Vijay Masharani (b. 1995, Bay Area, CA) is an artist and writer based in the Bay Area, CA. He received his MA in Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies from University College London in 2022, completing his thesis on W. E. B. Du Bois’ last works under the tutelage of Paul Gilroy. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. He had his first institutional solo exhibition, Big Casino at Kunsthalle Zürich, in early 2025. He has published writing in Parapraxis, e-flux, BOMB, Momus, X—TRA, and elsewhere. He will next present work in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 in the Spring. He is represented by Clima, Milan.
In his studio practice, he makes videos and drawings on an ongoing basis, in a manner resembling life writing. In his critical writing, he comments on art, politics, illness, literature, and race.