Ritika Biswas, Blisters, on Pharmaco-Poetics, Ecologies, and Spectrality, 2024*
Ysé Sorel, Blast Blister, 2023
*“We sit within the works of Kwama Frigaux— these tapestry-sculptures, shiny ghostly beings are created out of empty medicine blisters she collects from hospitals, pharmacies, old age homes, friends, lovers. She assembles their pains, highs, and desires catalysed by these plastic packs, she peels the aluminium and paints the emptiness where the pills once sat, she traces the spectral gestures of their fingers which once popped out these pills, and traces of the chemicals that once entered their bloodstream still stain these sculptures. Some, when viewed from the front, evoke the stained glass of churches and other religious architecture, superstructures which are akin to hospitals and pharmacies in their own right. The stain is not static, medicinal traces circulate in the air and the molecular economies in which we are all implicit.
These works, viewed from the ‘back'; become text— text as and of traces, traces as stains, traces as transmogrification; transformation that is biochemical, corporeal, pharmaceutical, political, sometimes even metaphysical. These texts spew the repetitive obfuscated semiotics designed to keep us out of its grammar, names we can hardly pronounce even though we trust our lives and bodies with them; these words that are synthesised horse, ox, and rabbit blood. This odd discrepancy mirrors the way we rely on structures, grammars, assurances prescribed to us which guide and control our existence, or at the very least, promise to take the edge of it.”
Ritika Biswas, On Pharmaco-Poetics, Ecologies, and Spectrality, 2024