The Mermaid’s Mirror is an immersive installation about cinema, intimacy and tropes of femininity, constructed around the figure of the tragic romantic heroine of Bombay cinema, Meena Kumari.

Illuminated screens – adapted from toy televisions – encircle the viewer to create a hypnotic, enclosed environment. Film stills – black-and-white, hand-tinted and monochrome – drawn from over twenty-five films made by Meena Kumari between 1940 and 1972, rotate within the toy TVs. Culled from romantic sequences, these show moments of heightened emotion and intimacy. Fragments of poetry, film dialogue, murmurs of female voices, rise and dissolve.

This early period of Indian cinema most typically presents women as ideal wives and mothers, with the nationalist ‘Mother India’ and the tragic romantic heroine taking on iconic stature. Meena Kumari, great tragedienne, exemplifies the deep internalization of stereotypes that aestheticize and valorizefemale abjection, reproducing her screen persona in her private life and poetry.

The work is not biographical. Rather, it plays on these tropes of love and desire, revealing their oppressive undergirding through the slippage between quotation and distortion. The installation employs repetition, both in its overall structure and within each TV screen, to draw the viewer into a circumscribed space, a trap, within which compulsive iterations of love, pain, loss, and death are endlessly repeated.

As in the mythical mermaid’s mirror, insight comes through distortion rather than accurate reflection.