Code-breaking has never been a hobby of mine. I’ve seen it in films, protagonists fighting against the clock to decipher a message made up of shapes and lines with wild eyes and foreheads furrowed. There’s usually a life or death element to these scenes, the potential for failure hanging in the balance, obscured by the veil of language. I’ve also seen codes used to explore societal disconnects, such as the optical morse codes of Parasite, or the scattered words of Sharp Objects. It has been a while, however, since I have come across a made up language in real life, something I thought had been left in the margins of school exercise books. It is not everyday, therefore, that I find myself trying to decipher a code on a 4pm train home, the world sliding by as I scrutinise unknown symbols. 

 These symbols are the product of Deshna Shah’s imagination, and make up what she calls her ‘Twilight Language’. Hieroglyphic-esque, the language is illustrative and evocative, its meaning feeling just out of reach. Combining aspects of Gujurati, Hindi and English, Shah weaves a message based on letters between loved ones, accrued from contributors and anonymised in this show. Family sits at the heart of this exhibition, and this softness imbues the gallery space with a sense of thoughtful consideration. Upon walking into ‘Kahani’, your body language is changed. Shah writes her Twilight message around the parameter of the space, laying the language in rice on the floor, unguarded. It is different, this trust in the audience. I have grown so used to invigilators twitching when you step ‘too close’ to an artwork that the lack of separation between viewer and work here feels quite exciting, like when I was little and my dad would let me change gears in the car. In this lack of boundary, I find myself walking gingerly in the space, a heightened awareness of where I put my feet. 

 The gallery at 5 Brewer Street (on the ground floor of the University of Oxford’s Pembroke College) is small and fairly narrow, but well designed none the less. In the middle of Shah’s show sits a greenhouse, emitting a blue glow from within. I am handed a programme as I enter the gallery, which has instructions that set something akin to a behavioural code for the show. As I get older, I find myself feeling conflicted about handouts and signs ushering me around gallery spaces; I don’t like the assumption that people can’t find things out for themselves, I don’t like the feeling that a god-like curator has to over-explain the collection by telling us which way to walk around a show, and I don’t like the expectation that all visitors can and will read the language of the gallery. It feels condescending, and awakens a stubborn rebelliousness that sees me walking deliberately anti-clockwise around an exhibit that, yes, probably would make more sense viewed the other way around.

 On the other side of this un-whole thought, however, is the importance of gallery texts in opening up shows to a wider audience - they can anchor the floating points of exhibits, drawing out intentions from what so often feel like the switchboards of a Very Clever Curator and a Very Important Artiste. The ‘Kahani’ exhibition text absolutely opens up the show, catering for an array of viewers by providing translations for the Hindi title of the show (‘kahani’ means ‘story’) and explaining the thought process behind the abstract elements of Shah’s work. Visitors such as myself (white Brits who only speak English) are given a morsel of a taste of being on the outside here, a position all too often locked around gallery goers who don’t speak the language of the establishment they are in. I am reminded of the work of Delaine Le Bas (a favourite of mine), who often writes in Romani at her shows without translation, pushing those used to the position of ‘insider’ to the outskirts. I am further reminded of the work of Le Bas when reading about Shah’s dyslexia in the hand out - while Le Bas creates a ‘visual documentation’ of Romani culture in her work (N. Hepburn, ‘Le Bas, Delaine’ in Meet Your Neighbours: Contemporary Roma Art from Europe, p. 111, translated by Árpád Mihály), Shah creates a very visual language that relies less on reading and more on seeing, while equalising viewers in that none of us can immediately read this alphabet. We are asked to look and to learn in ‘Kahani’, activating us as viewers and pulling us into Shah’s work, as well as her world. 

 Although Shah keeps her Twilight Language close to her chest, she urges us to decipher its meaning for ourselves, incentivised by the promise of a reward for the first to do so. I find this code cracking competition funny, it strikes me as a very Oxford university take on participatory art. Alongside a page left blank for code-breaking related note taking, the handout tells me to please go inside the greenhouse, and so I do. The greenhouse is filled with a heady scent that reminds me of a spa, it is fragrant and clean, thickening the borderline between the inside of this structure and the outside of the gallery space. The smell dulls the hyper-awareness caused by Shah’s delicate installation, with the frosted walls giving a comforting sense of privacy. 

 Smell is a very deliberate form of sensory engagement used in the show. Shah writes in the wall text about how she has, throughout her life, experienced smell being contorted by her peers into a tool of ridicule, made into something to be ashamed of, something to be disguised. This sense of duality - of home life and outside life, of layers of smell being used to hide the other - gives the frosted greenhouse walls a new significance; they obstruct what lies within and contort spectators’ vision, giving its inhabitants an un-gazed upon space. Shah reclaims aroma in her show, deciding to overwhelm visitors with the intensity of the greenhouse’s vapours. While this feels like an empowering installation choice, I also note the smell is completely contained within the greenhouse. This sets a boundary, giving the scent a precious feeling (we are told to ensure that the greenhouse doors stays shut). It also evokes something of the shame that Shah speaks of, alongside the feeling that perhaps after years of trying to leave certain smells at home, Shah now enshrines them within this symbol of her childhood home. It is lovely, I think, a small glowing structure full of scent. It anchors the exhibit, a lighthouse perched on a rock surrounded by the swirling pool of the Twilight language. While viewers puzzle over what the symbols mean, we have a recognisable port into which we can retreat. 

 ‘Kahani’ is a thoughtful show, it feels a bit like being wrapped in a folded page from Shah’s notebook that she keeps in her pocket. For such a young artist (Shah graduated from Oxford in 2021), this show feels contemplative and retrospective, contrasting beautifully with the modern neatness of its curation and install. I left 5 Brewer street feeling blissed out, calm and dreamy, with that rare sense that I’ve been allowed to understand an artist meaningfully and without pretence. I have not, however, been able to crack the Twilight language yet - but maybe that’s not such a bad thing.