Before You See The Scar: When A Scar Becomes An Identity, And The Gaze That Refuses To Look Beyond It

A wound is supposed to have an ending. The skin closes, the pain subsides, and eventually what remains is a scar, a mark of something from the past, but also of something that healed while being in the present. However, not every scar disappears. Does that mean the healing is stuck, or is it just a reminder that the past is still stuck on to you?

Some scars remain on the body for years, and some for a lifetime. When a face is marked this way — a face that is supposed to be the epitome of beauty, an identifier of a human being, it can make it impossible to separate the mark from the person who carries it. Before a name is known, before a story is heard, the scar is often looked at first.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a scar is “a mark left on the skin after a wound has healed”. But what happens when the mark stays? When something meant to record a wound begins to determine how a person is seen?

That is where Monica Dhaka’s visual art work, Before You See the Scar begins.

A mixed-media project, made in collaboration with acid attack survivors from Delhi’s Brave Souls Foundation, looks at what happens after the violence — to the body, but also to the way that body is seen. Dhaka is a visual artist whose practice has long been concerned with the body and the assumptions attached to it. The project will next be exhibited at the Dhoomimal Art Centre from September 14 to 21.

The project is built around a simple yet often overlooked observation: for survivors, the scar can become the first thing people notice, before the person behind it, but what if that order could be reversed?

For Dhaka, that question began with something she witnessed on a Mumbai local train. She saw a survivor being asked to sit somewhere else because another passenger was uncomfortable sitting next to her. The incident stayed with Dhaka. That same night, she came across a social media video from the Brave Souls Foundation, watched more of the survivors’ stories and reached out to them.

Dhaka did not want the scars to become another way of telling the survivors’ stories only through what had happened to them. “Usually, when people think of an acid attack, the first things they imagine are pain, trauma, and suffering. I wanted to change that with my project,” she says.

Dhaka does not begin by showing the faces.

Instead, she brings the viewer close to something that will not catch your eye right away. At first glance, the images can resemble beautiful landscapes from a faraway land, but once you learn they are extreme close-up photographs of burnt and scarred skin, the question becomes: how can this be? From a distance, they can appear almost unfamiliar; up close, their source becomes clear.

The viewer is not immediately told what they are looking at. Dhaka deliberately avoids showing recognisable body parts, choosing instead to isolate the skin so that the first encounter is with an image rather than an explanation of an acid attack. She wanted the viewer to wonder what they were seeing before learning where the image came from.

The effect is not simply visual. It changes the position of the viewer. The idea is not to disguise the scars, but to interrupt the response they might ordinarily provoke.

What appears simple from a distance becomes more complicated when one stays with it. The same applies to the women whose bodies are so often reduced to what happened to them.

In Before You See the Scar, that idea is inseparable from the social life of the survivor.

An acid attack can leave physical injuries that remain long after the immediate violence has ended. But there is another aftermath: being looked at differently. Being stared at. Being treated as though the visible evidence of violence is also an explanation of who you are.

This is where the exhibition pushes against the idea of normality. A survivor can stand up for herself, build a life, work, form relationships, support a family and make plans for the future. Yet none of that necessarily changes the first judgement made by someone who sees her scar. The survivor may have moved forward while the gaze around her remains fixed on what happened to her.

The second part of Dhaka’s installation shifts the focus.

Eight black-and-white portraits show the survivors as they want to be seen. Each portrait is accompanied by a part of their life story that is not only about the scars they carry, but also about the lives they live.

There is no attempt to hide the scars.

Instead, the portraits refuse to let the scars do all the talking.

The women are not presented simply as victims of an attack, nor are they turned into symbols of resilience. The portraits allow them to exist as individuals whose lives contain much more than the event that altered their appearance.

Dhaka’s intention is to shift the audience from seeing acid attack survivors as a “problem” to considering what it means to make space for them. She wants the work to encourage people to be welcoming, inclusive and kind, rather than allowing discomfort or curiosity to become another form of exclusion.

That is also what makes the project different in its approach. The exhibition does not place the violence at the centre of every image. It begins with the gaze, then gradually reveals the body and finally the person.

By the time the viewer reaches those portraits, the scar has already been seen. But it has also been stripped of its power to explain the entire person.

Dhaka wants the project to leave something behind beyond the exhibition itself: a different response when someone encounters a survivor in everyday life. Not pity. Not staring. Not intrusive questions asked simply because the scar is visible. Just the basic recognition that the person in front of you does not owe you an explanation for how they look.

The wound may have healed. The scar may have stayed.

What happens next depends on the people who look at it, or does it?