Talwar Gallery unveils Navjot Altaf’s new multi-channel video based installation in New Delhi.

The new video film ‘Touch IV (2010)’ is evolved from this acclaimed artist’s well-documented concerns regarding the subtle nuances of touch. The 22 channel video installation explores various forms of it – intimacy, sensation, desire – interfacing with and through the human body – and sexuality. The work looks to reflect upon a curious multi layer discourse visually narrating her interaction with sex workers.

Navjot Altaf’s earlier interaction with these sex workers, carrying on with a profession very much of their own choice, was at Mumbai’s Prithivi Theater, while they were enacting their own life stories. Later the interaction deepened at Sangram center as well as Vamp organization in Sangli district of Maharashtra.

The artist in this new collaboration with sex workers tries to explore the delicate equilibrium between the human body and touch, in order to map varied aspects of undesired (desired) touch, the right to one’s body, human rights, sexual violence, and how through these suffering sex workers have arisen an image of themselves as a meaningful social construct and apparent empowerment, leading to an increased awareness of the self attained through critical action.

The multiple points of engagement between them and the artist are derived from the protagonists’ spoken words, their experiences, repetitive forms, referential signs, images, movements etc.