Blog

Let us walk, together.

    To say that the transdisciplinary practice of Ashwini Bhat, spanning ceramic sculptures and installations, videos, and performance, is deeply entangled with the artist's respect for the natural world-that is, the organic, the non-human, and the more-than human-is to speak one partial truth. With this truth, we can begin to understand how Bhat's walks along her local Northern California landscape-through towering thickets of redwoods and across forest floors once scorched by flames, now teeming with new life-embedded themselves deep into the folds of her abstract ceramic sculptures and across the skin of their sinuous forms and textured surfaces. Tracing this path alongside Bhat, we expand the possibility of understanding the self in its expanded field, a "self that touches all edges," to quote Wallace Stevens. 

If limits signal a hostile boundary – or a presumed end – of material or thought, why approach it? And at this concrete edge, what can you even find? Sandeep Mukherjee taps into an unusual but uncanny impulse from the very onset of this exhibition, wherein a deliberately orchestrated atmosphere unsettles your gaze. From afar, antagonistic structures are juxtaposed against one another, but as you move closer, these material antipodes (pushed to their extreme edges) stage the necessary contradictions that make (and unmake) our perceptual realities. The limit is not transcended nor does it collapse; for Mukherjee doesn’t fathom escapist pathways, rather, he compels viewers to “think through the end limits of our [human] condition.” [1]

Undoing Spectrality 

a body vanishes from the surface/ its remains seep into the stage-screen/
diatomic actors flicker in the sky-light/ a chimeric dance across thresholds

The ghosts of words and borders continue to haunt artists of colour in global contemporary art stages. What does it mean to inhabit that stage with a script and process of one’s own making and the spectrality of one’s selves? This question not to merely extend the semiotics of the title, but to materialise and visualise what is often unuttered, unspoken, and unthought but deeply felt by many who inhabit these multiple non-/bodies. Going from the auteurist (situated within the artist as self and anthropocentric) to the planetary (situated alongside non-human bodies and more-than-human technologies), the tethers between Sandeep Mukherjee’s and Rohini Devasher’s praxes, respectively, create a spectral spectrum of responses in their makings.

Not simply a return to the ‘spectral turn’ of the 1990s-2000s academic sphere and Derridean deconstruction, Spectral Theatre also gestures to the anxieties and joys in the failures of performing certain materialisations and politics of assumed corporealities that in turn render ghosts of us who do not. And these seemingly spectral existences must be part of the larger discursive realms where geopolitics, science, art, and critical discourse commune. We inhabit the spectral in teleological modes. This text is not about why or how ghosts exist, but rather what can spectrality reveal; an invitation to dwell within the spectres of our present(s) and present selves, both speculative and lived. Hauntings are not necessarily nefarious or burdensome, but are propulsions to consider the unseen and incomprehensible. We exist within imminent threats of extinction, in individual and collective reckonings, be they through the ceaseless breakdown of socio-political and capitalist systems that are snowballing the climate apocalypse, the difficulty of being both human and non-human bodies in a differentiated ways, or the slow toxicities of living in an inequitably dying world. Spectral Theatre hovers among these liminalities of human and non-human mortality as well as the joys of encounter in phantasmic gaps that acknowledge and live in and despite these knowledges.

“An exhibition is a temporary realization of something that we want to be perceived on a level beyond whatis visible.” [1]

There is a gentleman dressed in his mother’s sari sitting among us.
We are in the presence of a decade of works by Hemali Bhuta, or as he would say, we are seeing them “in the flesh”. We are letting them fill us… bleed on us…We came for this, we were waiting for this… at times solemnly, at times giggling…
Like in Marguerite Duras’ writings, ellipses have become our way of communicating…
In Duras’ novel Moderato Cantabile, Anne says: “I would like you to never stop talking…
Closure is resisted…Always… Inconclusions…
We are reading while writing… A candle is lit. Immense sadness…
A painting in indigo of a photo taken by the gentleman of the Subarnarekha river appears on my screen.

 “Infinite time rocks the earth, the ebb and flow of the tide. The world turns. My pulse is beating and my veins throbbing. And in wonder, my song bursts forth” [2]

This place to where ghosts regress isn’t always allotted to a time before the arrival of sleep. Sometimes one finds oneself transported to this corpse through the most wakeful and banal encounters. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the grating bareness of death, illness and precarity has seeded itself within the symbolic refuge of early safety that Porter alludes to. Now the ghosts are among us, our consociates. The churn of our time impels us to invent a language to honour this alliance and find a way to grieve collectively. Tested obituarial modes of lament, eulogy, and regret don’t suffice anymore. The sheer scale of loss, its systemic underpinnings, and the ongoing efforts of the state to deny its occurrence and erase its memory call for a recalibration. How do we relate to the too many we have lost and the world after their departure? The comfort of regress and the transformative potential of the encounter vie for spiritual legitimacy in the audience of ghosts and beings alike. 

Prajakta Potnis , How To Decide Which Human Gets Your Last Ventilator

By Emily Gallacher Viall (Emily Gallacher Viall Is A Nurse And Poet)

In looking for landscape—

Eyes by the windowsill wait for the brain to light up the slope of the hill. Thought cuts a strobe to the farthest reaches of the horizon. Beds of flowers appear at the edge of a dry riverbed. Great green grasses shiver on scorched plains otherwise racked by so much wind the stones have gone blank. Slowly, filling with crags and scars and pretty fossils, the stones begin to tell how old a land is. Landscapes get plucked out of land that may not exist as one would like. Art beguiles by such landscapes. Even when they are ravaged, there is hope they will be beautiful, because landscapes are not so much fact as inventions of artistic material. This is the conviction that secures them a place in imagination. The same, one might hazard, reveals an economy of the blind—a system of entitled visionaries who power weak suns with their desires.

One thing after another.

The ecstasy of narrative begins early, inside the womb while listening to the story from the other side, at the playground with imaginary companions doing your bidding, or in that first fib about how you got a black eye at school. When bringing up ‘narrative’ what we’re really talking about is expectations, about the plausibility of material presented and how to reckon with its claims, one thing after another.

So intertwined is narrative expectation with flat surfaces – let’s call them drawings and paintings – that some deem the genre a much too safe creed. For if a drawing or a painting is living up to expectations, it must also presume their residence, somewhere, in a fictionalised receiver. You. The useful idiot. That’s what it boils down to.

On entering a quarry, one enters the earth. One descends into that which as long as it existed could not be accessed. A rock is a record of everything that formed it—the magma of millions of years since a volcano erupted. Inside a quarry, the surface of the rock is the ultimate intermediary; its exposure to forces of extraction leads to the layer beneath. An image of a quarry is always a negative; it is that which has been excavated that enables the image to come into being.

Exhibition text by Prajna Desai, Curator