Reading from my diary,
“When I first saw the lake“
The sound of flipping pages, forced penetration of the screen, and place as a sound
ASKING FOR GUILT-HEALERS
To replace the world, in a new way to reveal its form. She dared, “self-consciousness is
not always a good thing”.
It is no longer work.
Blank page so that I can write again.
A forced ego, turning the page, forcing the page.
“how temporary our personal histories are”, she observed and paused to suggest you
recognize sound over time, then forget, and also let it go sometimes… I think about
reappearance; the self that reappears each time we destroy ‘us’ or ‘I’.
I’m a self-taught artist reading from my diary.
“In my conversations, there is a process of painting”
The audience had found their medium and form, didn’t need an artist anymore. For them the
place of art was a vector, they had adopted it as a tool to kill anyone who was not an audience.
(In conversation with Akansha Rastogi, during an online
workshop ” Enter The Dragon” 2020 conceptualized by Paribatana Mohanty conducted by K.N.M.A,2020.)
Self-Introduction
Video 05:50 Minutes
“It all started when I gave myself a visit.”
Where Nothing Grows
Photographic Print/25X17 Inches/2019
Instability took me everywhere!
Photographic Print/25X17 Inches/2019
“There is still a kind of reality in this, because the present itself has this inherent quality of instability. “
Photographic Print/16X11 Inches/2017
Do the eyes just see? Or does their functional horizon extend beyond just visual perception, so that the very form of the eyes leaves an impression? Is the field of vision exhausted by ‘looking’ or ‘seeing’?
Photographic Print/ 21X3 Inches/2017
We are unknown to ourselves, we men[sic] of science, and for good reason. Since we have never searched for
ourselves, how should we ever find ourselves?1
1 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Genealogy of Morals, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape
Town, Singapore, São Paulo, 2007), 45
Drawing/text — From Diary/2017
It is an identification of the self as a mediation between the known and the unknown; a
thought which cannot be consumed by a conditioned mind. The encounter or sight alone would be enough.
Lake with a Horizon
Oil on found polyurethane surface / 48 X 13 Inches/ 2017
It starts from long walks.
Encountering the unknown -scapes, lakes, dumping grounds, junkyards, corners, and abandoned spaces. Sometimes it is a shape, texture,size, state, or sometimes nothing but a reflection.
Meaningful coincidence, I’d say, using Jung’s terminology and with attention comes the ability to address such occurrences and events. In the present, however, there is no coincidence. Synchronicity(ɹ̩tam) has been a long-debated subject but there is still this unknown relationship between what we call the unconscious and what we call matter.
Nonetheless, as we think further, we may realize that these phenomena cannot be separated. Jung had put forward his analysis on the concept of synchronicity. The term means meaningful coincidence of outer and inner events that are not themselves causally connected.
“Synchronistic events rest on the simultaneous occurrence of two different psychic states. One of them is the normal, probable state(i.e., the one that is causally explicable), and the other, the critical experience, is the one that cannot be derived causally from the first.”2
The profound subjective development of my working process is not based(as many would suppose), on an innate tendency to visionary dreaming, but on acute practical observation of nature. Forced by the elusive character of nature to study my inner being, I began to dissect and analyze the microcosm and from that the central point to penetrate still deeper into the mysterious universe. The science of the invisible is as exact and empirical as the western science of the natural. The impetus towards the inner sprang from my study of the outer.
2 Jung, C.G. SYNCHRONICITY, An Acausal Connecting Principle, trans. R.F.C. Hull, (Princeton University Press,
Princeton and Oxford, 1973)
“Unlike all the other art forms, the film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I’d say that film is the sculpting of time.
-Andrei Tarkovsky
Liminality
Liminality
Video 05:27 minutes
2018
The process is neither seamless nor total. This becomes apparent at the edges of these
optical enclosures, where it is possible to still access an “in-between” state which carries
a subversive potential. It involves the labor of imagination which can identify the limits
of, and actualize ways of seeing spaces outside of their intended views.
Curatorial note by Arghya Chakraborty
(Open- Display at SNU) Lake with a horizon
Oil on found Polyurethane/ 150X9 Inches/2018
Coming back to physical dimensions like the extensive horizontal shapes/surfaces, I realized their incompatibility with these
vertical/square format screen spaces which we come across almost everywhere, including paintings and photographs. To be precise
when an attempt is made to digitally fit it within the standard formats, it resists and then goes away into the distance.
~lake with a horizon
Oil on Polyurethane/150X9 Inches/2018
In “Liminality and Communitas,” Victor Turner begins by defining liminal individuals or entities as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” (1969: 95). Using Sartre’s terminology, he states: “I see liminality as a phase in social life in which this confrontation between ‘activity which has no structure’ and its ‘structured results’ produces in men their highest pitch of self-consciousness” (1974: 255).3 In my mind, I equate this higher pitch of self-consciousness with attention and the resulting capacity of addressing the unknown. Something I find startling about consciousness is how it reveals and conceals just enough to mark its presence. I have been working with different kinds of representations of the self and see repetition as something which truly disguises itself. It is not underneath a mask, but is a sequence of masks in temporal and spatial succession, from one point to another, one present to another. The masks do not hide anything, it evokes the uncertainty and the possible presence of the unknown.
Present continuous
3 Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process, Structure and Anti-structure, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York.
Present continuous
Duration: 06:02 minutes
2018
Repetition can be a good thing if it means a chance to choose something you repent having lost. Repetition
also reinforces the idea that it is best to live in the present, not in some imaginary elsewhere. “If repetition exists,
it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive
opposed to the ordinary, and instantaneity opposed to variation, and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every
respect, repetition is a transgression. It puts the law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in
favor of a more profound and more artistic reality.4
4 Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, New York 1994
~ But it is a different one
Photographic Print/25X17 Inches/2019
Not far into Jean-Paul Sartres’ novel, Nausea, its narrator, Antoine Roquentin, suffers
from a curious problem; one that might at first glance seem merely idiosyncratic, which
has, in fact, become surprisingly common in our late modernity. Thus has profound
difficulty, that is, recognizing or understand the psychological expressiveness of the human
face…even his own. Looking in the mirror one day, his gaze is transfixed by enigmatic,
bizarre, even inhuman sight- a “grey thing” is how he describes it “my gaze travel slowly
and wearily down over this forehead, these cheeks: it meets nothing firm, and sinks into
the sand. Admittedly there is a nose there, two eyes, and a mouth, but none of that has
any significance, nor even a human expression… I lean my whole weight on the
porcelain edge, I push my face forward until it touches the mirror. The eyes, the nose,
the mouth disappears: nothing human is left.”
7/21 , Photographic Print/168X5 inches/2017
“This endeavor is an attempt to capture the “in-between” where the potential of seeing
lies, and imagine what it takes to peer into the unknown. An acute observation of vertical and horizontal shifts/displacements from Indoor to Outdoor,Natural to Artificial, Proximity to Distance, Sacred to Secular.”
Darshan
Photographic Print/31X26 Inches/2018
“The word ‘Darshan’ and how it operates in the context of the deity or the seer who
bestows darshan while the people receive it. When devotees visit a shrine, their eyes
meet the powerful, eternal gaze of God. Darshan is translated as auspicious sight. It is
said that not just the worshippers who gaze at the divine, the divine also gazes back at
them. The contact between the devotees and the divine is an exchange through vision.
Jan Gonda in his detailed research on the gaze and the eye as it is described and
explained in the Vedas has enumerated many ways in which the powerful gaze of the
divine was imagined even before divine manifestation in the form of the image. When
the divine image began to be made, the eyes were the last part to be placed. The gaze
from the newly opened eyes of the divine is said to be so powerful that it shouldn’t come
directly in contact with the living. It is obscured by placing an offering or by putting a
mirror where it can see its own reflection.” 5
5Eck, Diana L. Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers private limited, Delhi,2007.
Surrender to Uncertainity
Open Display at S.N.U. – Painting Installation(Black Oxide on found Wooden panel)/2019/ 72 X 264 Inches
A narrow passage into a mildly dark room leading to three points of view. It is
similar to the instant experience of entering an unfamiliar space, where one sees
everything at once but nothing in particular.
“A small obstacle, at any rate, a constantly diminishing obstacle.” – F.K
Ubiquitous
(Video screens installed against a vertically erected screen painted black and blocking the possibility of direct contact.)
Ubiquitous, 2018
Duration 02:10 minutes
What is the horizon?
A line where land meets sky?
The end of the world or the beginning of perception?6
6 Maleuvre, Didier. The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing. University of California Press, 2011.
Photographic Print/16X11 Inches/2017
The horizon seems to be a place of encounter between the conspicuous and
inconspicuous, and therefore still one of those known unknowns of life that has long
escaped the logical human mind in general. What about ‘a walk towards the horizon? A
question that has never failed to intrigue me. Our history tends to reason away the
problem of the horizon. Even though explored throughout the ages, the question still
remains today. Perspective also is a form of illusion that leads towards a sense of
horizon. It takes the self away from reality.
Breaking of the Horizon
(View 2 of 7) Oil on found plywood
Installation/ 279 X 6 Inches/2018
(Open- Display at SNU)
(View 6 of 7)
(View 4 of 7)
(View 1 of 7)
~ After Departure
Self Portrait
Oil on canvas, 2019
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