Zinda Dargore · Munibah Nooresehr

Zinda Dargore Buried Alive

This series looks back at a period when I gave up painting and every other aspiration · a time when a distorted perception of religion and culture buried me alive. It was a Stockholm syndrome: I was content, even at peace, in a very dark place. These paintings are the womb of those bad thoughts, and the figure inside them is myself.

The work inverts the logic of the classical miniature. Traditionally the illuminated border is paradise and the gold-framed inner field is the jewel of the page. Here the protagonist is entombed inside that most gilded, most lovingly framed space · the cage is the treasure, the prison is also the place of greatest beauty and care. The earthen oval that holds her reads at once as womb, as grave, and as a jewel-setting: a place of origin, of burial, and of false preciousness, all in one.

Throughout the series, hair is the binding. Her own hair becomes rope, root, and umbilical cord descending from a dead tree; it wraps her upright like a serpent, or lies coiled in her own hands. It is a captivity she manufactures and maintains herself. Her face stays serene and passive · the horror is that she is content there, watched over by spectral grey figures and barren trees that wait at the edges of every frame.

The palette holds to a narrow register of ochre, terracotta, black, and gold. That near-monochrome is the depression itself; the gold is the gilded complacency that made the dark place bearable. In the borders, a chorus of mourning figures echoes her posture and populates the edges of her prison · other selves keeping vigil over a person who does not yet wish to be woken.

That these paintings exist at all is the answer to the state they depict: the work has outlived it.