Divya Mehra Lifts the Carpet

In the 1984 cult classic Ghostbusters, when the god Gozer asks the protagonists what form they’d like the destroyer of the world to take, one of the team envisages Stay Puft Marshmallow Man – the seemingly harmless mascot of an ultra-processed snack food – who wreaks havoc on New York before finally being restrained. At more than nine metres tall and six metres wide, multidisciplinary artist Divya Mehra’s inflatable replica, We’re Ready to Believe in You (2024), almost entirely fills the second room of her solo show, ‘The End of You’, at Night Gallery. Though Stay Puft appears facedown mid-fall, his enormity commands the space and threatens to force everything else out of the way.

Similarly to Mehra’s other inflatables – which have ranged from a Taj Mahal replica (Afterlife of Colonialism, 2018) to a genie lamp (Your Wish Is Your Command, 2023) – the work is both viscerally engaging and socially engaged. To navigate the space, viewers must manoeuvre around and behind the distended nylon body. The fallen figure’s D-rings, typically threaded with ropes to parade such balloons through city streets, are unbound, suggesting a loss of control over the corporate systems shaping our sociopolitical realities.

Around the gallery’s perimeter, framed cartoons from the series ‘The End of You’ (2020–ongoing) and the ten-metre-long neon Landscape Painting (2024) compound the sense of overwhelm. The watercolours, which depict people of colour in service positions observing distant crimson mushroom clouds as their white customers remain oblivious, present an effective scale shift. Given the spatial constraints and lack of expository wall text, it’s difficult to pick up on Landscape Painting’s clever conceit: the glass letters that spell ‘DIASPORA’ when illuminated are connected to sensors that turn the neon off when motion is detected. Visitors may wonder if the piece is merely unplugged or inoperable before considering the condition of invisibility experienced by diasporic subjects.

The far wall in the first gallery would have better served the neon, but perhaps the artist feared crowding the show’s pièce de résistance, You’re Doing the Work (Diamond Jubilee) (2024). Unfurled across a raised platform is a carmine, ecru and sage textile reminiscent of traditional Persian carpets that takes the shape of post-Partition India. On the adjoining wall, a motorized arm holding a steel-tip broom glides across an aluminium rail. When the arm reaches an elevated section of carpet, it uses the broom to sweep beneath the rug. The serviette draped over the forearm and the uncanny finger movements render this subversion of a familiar idiom not so much playful as sardonic, even sinister. 

Building on Mehra’s longstanding interest in the truth-telling fool, parody and doublespeak, these works have a perceptible gravity. Thanks to the continental contours of the carpet and the abrasive bristles, one doesn’t need to look beneath the rug to understand that the sweeping action is destroying the wooden platform. For the artist, whose parents immigrated to Canada from India, the death and forced migration of millions of people following Britain’s departure in 1947 after some 200 years of colonial influence is neither an abstract history lesson nor an inconvenient truth that can be swept under the rug.

In this way, the installation invites viewers to see through the mechanisms of corporate and political subterfuge – the colourful cartoons, gaudy balloons, neutralized narratives, flashy consumer goods and shiny technologies – to the human cost of imperial intervention and unchecked capitalism. It is the enduring hope inherent to this line of enquiry that moves me: to believe in the value of lifting the veil (or carpet) is to believe that, if faced with the truth, despite contrary historical precedent, it’s possible yet for people to apprehend, and choose to defend, our shared humanity.

Divya Mehra, ‘The End of You’ is on view at Night Gallery, Los Angeles until 19 October

^{Main image: Divya Mehra, ‘The End of You’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles; photographer: Nik Massey}