Show · 2025–26
Sacred Dirt
Multimodal exhibition about Mother Teresa and volunteering in Kolkata
About the exhibition
The exhibition looks at disgust, transgression and care between the destitute and dying people of Kolkata and the volunteers and religious sisters who look after them in the homes of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.
Its core is the material from my anthropological fieldwork at the Kalighat Home for the Dying Destitutes in 2016 and 2019–20: field sketches, fragments of fieldnotes, photographs, video and sound recordings. Philosophical excerpts on pollution and transgression, and historical and ethnographic examples of mystics who embraced filth, sickness and death as embodiments of the sacred, sit beside them.
The exhibition challenges the idea of dirt, sickness and death as the meaningless, undesirable side of life. It shows how they hold a central place in the networks of care that sustain the humanitarian world.
In the rooms
The glass ward
Copies of beds from the Kalighat Home hang upright beside lines strung with latex gloves, plastic jars and aprons. QR codes on the beds play recordings of fieldnotes and interviews from the Home. The Missionaries of Charity’s painted motto, You Did It to Me, overlooks the ward, while the murmurs and moans of the Home and the chants of Holy Mass recorded there play in the background.
The volunteer’s room
A replica of a volunteer’s room in a cheap guesthouse on Sudder Street, with a fresco of the Virgin Mary, a few books on Mother Teresa and volunteering, and a copy of my fieldnotes notebook. Still half empty, it serves as the exhibition’s guestbook.
The Kali corridor
A statue of Kali, with a short text on foreigners’ enchanted and disturbed perceptions of the city, on Kali’s importance for Kolkata, and on her unlikely mystical affinity with Mother Teresa through death and suffering.
The Mother Teresa corridor
Memorabilia from the Home, with portraits and sayings of Mother Teresa and the holy medal every volunteer receives as a token. A short text tells her life and how a rest house for pilgrims to the Kali temple became the Home for the Dying.
The mysticism corner
Photographs of volunteers embracing residents, with the account of the volunteer Penny, who saw the body of Christ in a woman covered in scabies. Beside them, St Francis among lepers, Catherine of Siena kissing a dying woman’s wounds, and the Aghori ascetics of Banaras. A short narrated story of the volunteers’ transformative experiences, set against the historical Christian and Hindu mystics, plays through QR codes.
The death corner
A video vitrine with a photograph from the crematorium and a sketch of a resident who had just died, with my fieldnote on the death of #15.
The sketch vitrine
Field drawings from both trips, made where photography was not allowed, with their captions. An audio guide in English and German leads through the rooms.