A response to of pillow poems and delayed dawns Text by Deborah Lim As a woman, I have often found myself more inclined to give than to take. Giving can carry with it a quality of sacrifice and humility, often accompanied by a lack of recognition or appreciation that feels disproportionate to the labour involved. There is also a frustrating bashfulness in asking for what one might rightly deserve. This is less an inherent quality than one we learn through social and historical conditioning. To take is to claim something for oneself: to take up space, to take pleasure, to take what one wants without automatically considering what can be given in return. Women are often expected to temper desire with consideration—to think of others, propriety, and consequence. Even pleasure can become something to be negotiated, justified or qualified. What, then, does it mean for a woman to take pleasure simply because it is hers? This was a key question that surfaced when I first encountered Dipali Gupta’s works in 2018, when she presented a series of four videos at Chan + Hori Contemporary in Singapore titled O HER!. The title was bold and uncompromising. Although none of the videos revealed the presence of women, female pleasure was placed at the forefront through a symphony of vibrators in action. The bedroom and kitchen had long been coded as sites of domestic labour and feminine virtue. In The Rabbit in Her Kitchen (2018) , a rabbit appears amidst kitchen knives and ingredients arranged on a countertop. The rabbit’s cuteness collides with the functional domestic objects surrounding it, carrying associations of reproduction, the Playboy bunny and, more specifically, the Rabbit vibrator, a dual-stimulation sex toy introduced in the 1980s . There was something mischievous about the rabbit being placed in the kitchen against a backdrop of vibrator sounds, bringing an object associated with personal pleasure into a space historically associated with female service to others. At the exhibition opening, the rabbit itself made an appearance, making its symbolism more absurd and tangible. The Little Death (La Petite Mort) (2018) extended Dipali’s interrogation of female pleasure through the visual language of ‘vanitas’. A sixteenth and seventeenth-century tradition of Dutch still-life painting, the genre was concerned with mortality, impermanence and the fleeting nature of worldly pleasures. The title itself evoked la petite mort, the French expression commonly associated with the death-like sensation of sexual climax, bringing together the seemingly contradictory states of death and pleasure. However, it is important to note that the art-historical canon had long been shaped by institutional structures that disadvantaged women. Women were largely excluded from formal art academies and the study of the nude, while still life was among the genres more accessible to women artists. Addressing this imbalance, Dipali reworked this history through an eclectic assemblage of vibrators and domestic objects—replacing traditional symbols of transience with contemporary objects of female desire instead. The female body remained absent, with pleasure implied through staging, sound and movement. These works did not demand that I become comfortable with addressing female sexuality. Instead, they made me aware of how much my discomfort is produced by inherited codes around what can be said, shown or desired. I could understand the works, even find them funny, and yet still feel the instinct to look away. This hesitation is part of the work’s power. It creates a space in which discomfort need not be immediately resolved, but can instead form the beginning of a conversation. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are…We make them feel as though by being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot see they have desire. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists Encountering Dipali’s work also made me recognise how deeply this conditioning extends into the representation of desire. The absence of the female body in O HER! was significant: there was no figure onto which the conventions of the male gaze could readily be imposed. In 2020, Dipali and I had several conversations about her next body of work, Desire Lines and Pages from the Book of Spring. ‘Desire lines’ are paths formed through repeated use that deviate from planned routes. Dipali applied the term to female sexuality as alternative pathways through the norms prescribing how desire is experienced and understood. This metaphor became particularly apt when Dipali began using the vibrator as a drawing instrument rather than for its prescribed function. The machine became an extension of the body, with the marks emerging somewhere between intention and chance. In Captured Traces I and II (both 2020), drawings enact their own desire lines through calligraphic strokes of ink on kitchen paper—generated through an assemblage of artist, body, and machine. There is a quiet subversion in this transformation. The vibrator, an object so specifically designed for the body, is removed from its expected context and asked to produce something else. The works recall Donna Haraway’s cyborg, which unsettles boundaries between human and machine, body and object. Dipali’s drawings similarly refuse a clean separation between artist and instrument; the marks emerge through their collaboration. Dipali’s interest in Gilles Deleuze is also relevant: desire need not arise from lack, but can generate new possibilities through experimentation. The drawings do not illustrate desire so much as produce new pathways for thinking about it. Pages from the Book of Spring is a version of the Desire Lines series which extends this enquiry into histories of erotic representation. Dipali began with the shunga or “spring pictures”, explicitly erotic images produced in Japan, particularly during the Edo period (1603–1868) . What intrigued Dipali was not simply their eroticism, but the systems of looking, desire, and power embedded within them. Shunga has a complicated history as these images were often produced by men and consumed in contexts including private pleasure, marriage and popular entertainment. Something that was once hidden, or understood primarily through its erotic function, has acquired the status of cultural heritage. This shift exposes how historically unstable the boundaries between erotic imagery, pornography and art can be. The work does not necessarily change; what changes is the position from which we examine it. Dipali’s intention is therefore not simply to reproduce these historical images, but to deterritorialise them—to enter their visual language and intervene from within it. Her abstract vibrator marks fragment recognisable identities and generate new meanings, almost as a form of “time travel” . These interventions bring a contemporary female perspective into conversation with visual histories often constructed through predominantly male perspectives. Works including What did you see? (2020), Lovers and a Lantern (2021), Devoured in the City of Dreams (2024) and Your Basic Touch is Not Enough (2025) illustrate this. The result is neither a rejection nor a straightforward reclamation. Dipali instead asks what might happen if we were to step inside inherited images and redraw them with a different intention—one that allows desire and pleasure to exist without the necessity of pleasing someone else. Dipali further extends this investigation beyond shunga, drawing from the Kama Sutra and the tradition of Indian miniature painting. The Hookah and the Muse (2025) explores erotic desire from a non-binary perspective, bringing abstract drawings made with a vibrator into dialogue with historical miniature paintings from the Rasamanjiri, or A Bouquet of Delight. Produced within the courtly culture of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Rajput and Pahari states, these erotic miniatures functioned as intimate objects of pleasure, power, and spectacle for elite patrons. By proposing an assemblage of body and machine, Dipali reframes this visual history by using the vibrator to disrupt the conventions of erotic representation and destabilise the authority of gendered ways of looking. Through abstraction and fragmentation, sensuality becomes fluid rather than fixed—resisting the heterosexual and gendered assumptions embedded within traditional depictions of desire. The work does not simply revisit the miniature tradition, but reworks its visual language to open up possibilities for non-binary and homoerotic forms of pleasure. The Kama Sutra is often reduced to a catalogue of sexual positions, but its concerns are broader, encompassing erotic love, relationships, and what Wendy Doniger describes as an “art of living”. It understands sexuality through systems of knowledge, culture and convention, giving desire language, choreography, and instruction. In Decorated Restrictions I and II (both 2025), vibrator marks fill the backgrounds, creating visual fields in which desire becomes formless—a presence rather than an identifiable object. The marks do not illustrate pleasure so much as create an atmosphere for it.   Dipali describes her absorption and interpretation of these references as “half-learnings” , fuelled by research and analysis. These histories are filtered through her visual language and the experience of an artist born in Mumbai and shaped by years of living in Southeast Asia. The exhibition title of pillow poems and delayed dawns draws these threads together in a poetic way. “Pillow poems” gestures towards shunga, while “delayed dawns” evokes the Indian tradition of miniature painting and its Nayika archetypes—heroines depicted in different states of love and desire. One such figure is Rati-Priya-Pragalbha, the mature nayika who delights in love. In the image that informs the exhibition title, dawn threatens to bring the lovers’ night to an end, and the heroine attempts to delay its arrival by covering the lotuses in her ears so that their opening will not announce the morning. Her gesture is both playful and purposeful. She is not passively awaiting desire, but actively resisting its conclusion. The delayed dawn becomes, in this sense, an image of desire that refuses to submit to the rhythms prescribed for it. If historical images teach us how desire has been represented, Dipali’s more recent works ask a different question: what happens when desire itself becomes something that can be manufactured, circulated, and sold? If the Pages from the Book of Spring series looked to the past, works such as A Bazaarful of Desires (2023), A Lovely Ride (2024) and Laundry Day (2026), turn to an image-saturated present in which desire is continuously produced and capitalised. In A Lovely Ride, Dipali extends this economy of desire from the commodity to the image, engaging with American artist Jeff Koons’ Made in Heaven series —a body of work that famously collapsed the boundaries between art, pornography, celebrity, and spectacle. Domestic materials such as pipe cleaners sit alongside the suggestion of two bodies, bringing the intimate and the constructed into the same frame. The work asks us to consider not only what we see, but how images teach us to see and desire. Laundry Day (2026) shifts this question from the image to the systems that produce it. The work sits at the intersection of the longstanding tension between art and pornography. It draws on the visual codes of vintage pornography while denying straightforward consumption through abstraction, fragmentation, and conceptual layering. At its centre, a washing machine marked with the words “Sex”, “Desire”, “Pleasure”, “Love”, and “Power” becomes more than a domestic appliance: it suggests a system that processes intimacy itself. The work also returns to Donna Haraway’s cyborg, but in a distinctly domestic form. Here, woman and machine become entangled. The cyborg is neither futuristic nor metallic, but domestic and sexualised, caught within systems of labour and consumption. Laundry Day thus connects the mechanisation of femininity within the domestic sphere to the mechanisation of desire in pornography. The accumulation of images in Dipali’s collages reflects this larger economy of desire. Images, objects and fragments compete for attention, reflecting a world in which desire is promoted through advertising, pornography, social media, beauty culture and consumer products. The question, then, is not simply whether pornography distorts our desires, but how desire itself is constructed through what we repeatedly see, consume, and learn to recognise as desirable. This resembles what Spanish writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado described through the term “pharmacopornography”—a system in which sexuality, technology, media and capitalism converge to produce and regulate bodies and their desires. Pleasure becomes an economy. The vibrator is both a tool of sexual autonomy and a commodity whose technological advancements open up new markets and, consequently, new desires. Liberation and consumption have become difficult to separate. If A Lovely Ride asks how desire is manufactured through images, This City, My Belly—A Garbage Dump (2026) brings the question back to the artist’s body itself. Made after Dipali’s return to Mumbai, the work emerged from both the city’s overwhelming noise, density and visual excess and a confrontation with her own changing body. Perimenopause brought an unexpected disconnect between what her mind wanted to do and what her body was capable of doing. The body, previously understood as the site through which desire could be pursued, became something to be renegotiated, supplemented and understood anew. Here, desire becomes more complicated. What happens when the body itself changes the conditions on which pleasure can be experienced? Desire becomes entangled with the physical realities of the body—its capacities, limitations and transformations. Much of Dipali’s practice has been concerned with what has been coded, controlled or made uncomfortable: female pleasure, the sexual object, the domestic sphere, the ageing body. But this is not straightforward reclamation. Dipali is interested in what happens when these categories are opened up, disrupted, and allowed to become something else—when contradiction, discomfort and incompleteness remain visible. This is what I have come to appreciate most about Dipali’s work: its refusal of easy liberation and neat answers. Instead, it asks us to sit with what makes us uncomfortable long enough to ask why. Her visual language is layered, playful and inviting, allowing complex ideas to unfold gradually and making room for dialogue rather than a predetermined response. The messiness and contradiction are not problems to be resolved, but part of what makes the feminist dimension of her practice compelling. I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. —Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist of pillow poems and delayed dawns ultimately feels less like an answer to the question of desire than an invitation to remain with it. Dipali’s works move across histories, bodies, technologies and cultures, asking who gets to desire, who defines it and who benefits from how it is shaped. Taking pleasure, then, is not simply about claiming something for oneself. It is about recognising the forces that have taught us what to want—and finding, along those inherited pathways, the courage to chart our own lines of desire.   References Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists. New York: Anchor Books, 2014. Aitken, Molly Emma. The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Artsy Editorial. “What Is Shunga?” Artsy, September 24, 2013, https://www.artsy.net/article/editorial-what-is-shunga. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Doniger, Wendy. “Reading the Kamasutra: It Isn’t All about Sex.” In On Hinduism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Gay, Roxane. Bad Feminist: Essays. New York: Harper Perennial, 2014. Gupta, Dipali. “Dipali Gupta in Conversation with Bela Arte(s).” Interview. Bela Arte(s), Instagram, 2020. Gupta, Dipali. “Moving Image Artworks.” Her Pleasure. Accessed August 8, 2026. https://dipaligupta.net/her-pleasure/moving-image-artworks/. Gupta, Dipali. “The Little Death (O HER! Series 1.2).” Her Pleasure. Accessed August 8, 2026. https://dipaligupta.net/her-pleasure/moving-image-artworks/. Gupta, Dipali. “Pages from The Book of Spring.” Her Pleasure. Accessed August 8, 2026. https://dipaligupta.net/her-pleasure/pages-from-the-book-of-spring/. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Harvard Art Museums. “Nayikas: Love’s Beauty and Perils.” Harvard Art Museums. Accessed August 8, 2026. https://harvardartmuseums.org/article/em-nayikas-em-love-s-beauty-and-perils. Koons, Jeff. “Made in Heaven.” 1989. Jeff Koons Studio. Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.jeffkoons.com/artwork/made-in-heaven. Lee, Ellen. “Playing Dirty,” Desire Lines: A Solo Exhibition by Dipali Gupta. The Back Room. October 2022. https://www.thebackroomkl.com/dipali-gupta/desire-lines/essay McNicol, Tony. “Shunga: Japanese Erotic Art Takes London by Storm.” Nippon.com. November 26, 2013. Accessed August 8, 2026. https://www.nippon.com/en/views/b02304/ Mortared, Alyssa. “The History of the Rabbit Vibrator.” Sexual Health Alliance. July 11, 2022. https://sexualhealthalliance.com/nymphomedia-blog/the-history-of-the-rabbit-vibrator. Muzdakis, Madeleine. “Vanitas: Paintings by the Dutch Old Masters Inspired by Life and Death.” My Modern Met, February 12, 2022. https://mymodernmet.com/vanitas-dutch-paintings/ Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews, January 1971. Reprinted in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce Henderson. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013. Randhawa, M.S., and S.D. Bhambri. Basohli Paintings of Rasamanjari. New Delhi, Abhinav Publications, 1981. Tee, Ian. Still Life and Little Deaths. Praxis. No. 13 (2019). LASALLE College of the Arts.   Deborah Lim Deborah Lim is an independent curator working at the crossroads of art and technology, where intersections and hybridities shape new ways of viewing and experiencing culture. Her practice brings together diverse disciplines such as art, film, design, fashion and digital innovation, creating exhibitions that illuminate the possibilities and tensions that arise when boundaries are blurred. She was formerly Curator of Exhibitions at ArtScience Museum in Singapore where she curated exhibitions including Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses (2025); Goddess: Brave. Bold. Beautiful. (2024); Notes from the Ether: From NFTs to AI and Sneakertopia: Step into Street Culture (both 2023). She is an Adjunct Lecturer at the LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, and part of the Advisory Committee for the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Centre for Lifelong Education, Singapore.