Illiquid Objects

Caro, Aruni Dharmakirthi, Renato Dib, Nicholas D'Ornellas, Katherine Earle, Qiqing Goh, Daniela Gomez Paz, Alexandra Hammond, Vandana Jain, Fatemeh Kazemi, Weihui Lu, Erin McQuarrie, Chiara No, Jacob Olmedo, Lena Ruth Schwartz, Shenequa, Zelikha Zohra Shoja, Anita Trombetta, Tulika Varma, Chengtao Yi

Curated by Yasmeen Abdallah & Defne Tutus

Conversations with you are always stultifyingly banal; antagonizing and impertinent. At times even extortionate. It’s always, you can’t clean, you can’t get anything right. / Why are you still in the office? Shouldn’t you have had dinner earlier? You’ll get fat, eating at this hour. / Give me money, money. / I need three hundred this month for groceries. / Another three hundred / because I have to have an extraction done. Another three hundred / for my trip up north. I reframe these in my mind into the following: leave it to me. I’m worried about you. Are you hungry? I’m sorry, but I need you / if only to trick myself / into eating crumbs of affection, illusory or otherwise. Sometimes, I wonder why you’ve never once asked me about my day. Sometimes, I wonder about yours. Most times, our ponderings sit scattered like needles in a tailor’s station. Easier to go through the eye of a needle than the kingdom of God. / Oh, heaven’s so distant, isn’t it? You can barely see it. Speak it, even. Most times, I wonder what it’s like, as I spin the fraying threads between us / into tapestries, knit them into sweaters / to be hung / in closets and on walls / like skeletons and curtains / declaring, without much aplomb / a love that should’ve been given and received / like blood on a cross. / Oh, isn’t heaven just light years away? Maybe, probably, most likely, there is a whole universe within you / begging to be tenderly unraveled / like some nascent star, but not by me. / Not with the blades you’ve gifted. Not when we’re waging war. And maybe, probably, most likely, it’s childish, but you’ve never been treated like a child. / Neither have I. But maybe someday, I’ll say, that’s okay, I understand what you couldn’t say. / Someday, the gossamer silk strings spun.

—Conversations With You (The Diametrics of Dialogue) by Qiqing Goh