As part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Rabindranath X Bhose’s first solo exhibition evokes the bog, a northern hemisphere wetland ecosystem once considered a spiritual portal. The exhibition consists of a work, DANCE IN THE SACRED DOMAIN, 2023, for which Bhose intermittently pasted puddles of iridescent vinyl onto the gallery floor and walls; these amoebic forms are lined with peat that the artist harvested in Shetland, an archipelago north of mainland Scotland where he spent time in meditation. Inspired by this stay, the exhibition embraces the bog as a fluid and fertile ground for queer and trans spirituality.
Presiding over the bog of Bhose is the tarot figure of the Hanged Man, whose serene expression belies his suspension from the gallows. Reminiscent of the bodies once bound with branches and ritually sacrificed in the bog, the Hanged Man appears in four forms on the windows of the gallery, incised in a layer of clay, peat, cocoa powder and testosterone gel. Hanging from the gallery’s ceiling is a cluster of branches that Bhose collected in his hometown of Glasgow, secured with moss collected from the vicinity of Calton Hill, a legendary Scottish cruising spot. These tree branches are strung together by colour-coded handkerchiefs, leather collars, cock rings and shibari rope: eerie emblems reminiscent of ancient artifacts sometimes found in Scottish bogs. Nestled among leather and wood, a single video offers glimpses of blue skies, a stalk of grass, and the fuzzy, semi-clothed form of Bhose, moving in ecstatic poses. “Move with the most tender gesture you can muster,” he intones in an audio work that accompanies the installation. Arms outstretched, navigating in the bog, he dances on the model of Le Pendu, offering a trans-pastoral.
