Swear Words for Dummies

The whole idea started with making an archive of swear words, therefore I started looking at dictionary as an archive. Questions which I was interested in dealing with were, what gets comprised in a dictionary and why? Dictionaries play a very important role in establishing the hierarchy of high and low form of speech. Swear words, specially are seen as something too degraded to be part of a dictionary, hence the questioning or analyses of such form of speech becomes impossible. My purpose of this work was to have a deeper insight about the nature of swear words which are extremely gender biased and are used very blatantly in day-to-day conversations.

The final display of the work consisted of three different components. The dictionary, which was kept on a wooden book stand, map of Hindi slang words written on three walls of the room and an audio piece playing in headphones.