Twelve Gates presents

Autobiography of a Cave System, a film performance and artist talk with Nureena Faruqi and Lohitha Kethu.

The event is part of Filaments, our spotlight series for disabled creatives.

Autobiography of a Cave System is a film performance and artist talk by Lohitha Kethu, presented with writer and artist Nureena Faruqi as part of Filaments: A Disabled Creative Spotlight Series.

In the film, Kethu uses a blood glucose meter, an older technology diabetics use to test their blood sugar, to prick their fingertips. They dip a paintbrush in the blood and paint a cave system by hand on watercolor paper, narrating prose-poetry for each cave as it appears. The film runs about 25-30 minutes.

For Kethu, being disabled evokes living underground: biding time, writing on the walls even if it means writing in your own blood, so that you might one day be remembered. A cave is solitary, but a cave system is collective, a journey of convergences and divergences. The work layers a visceral experience of diabetes with prehistoric cave life, ethnic and creative lineage, mysticism, and medical technology. It reaches toward a disabled yearning for connection and meaning that extends beyond linear time, data, or material reality.

The glucose meter becomes a ritual interface between a machine that “reads” the body and the ancient processes inside it. Diabetes is a common South Asian condition, and also a testbed for what it means to depend on machines and algorithms that surveil your body’s data. The film asks what intimacies arise from knowing the computer and then becoming part-computer by disability. In answer, it draws blood to build itself a new lineage of cave painters, spirits, trans disabled ancestors, family, and computers.

After the screening, Kethu will give an artist talk expanding on these themes, followed by a Q&A and a chance to view other work.

Nureena Faruqi

is a visual artist and writer based in Philadelphia, supported by VONA, Kearny Street Workshop, Penland School of Crafts, and the Durham Arts Council.

Through SAADA’s Archival Creators Fellowship, she recorded oral histories of disabled/chronically ill South Asian Americans, work shaped by her own experience as a disabled caregiver and Care Fellow with Caring Across Generations. Her writing appears in The Offing and two poetry anthologies. She’s an MFA candidate at Antioch University LA and Lead Editor of Visual Art for Lunch Ticket.

Lohitha Kethu

is a multimedia artist, medical artist, and writer based in Baltimore, creating contemporary cave paintings that witness gender-variant, disabled life and imagination.

Originally trained in medical illustration, they later shifted toward fine art through disability justice and arts fellowships with Our Art Room Agency, the NYC Canopy Program, and Labs for Liberation. Their work has shown at the Peale Museum and the Society for Contemporary Craft, with writing in Women’s Studies Quarterly and GARLAND. Read more on lohithakethu.com