Rebellion
Rebellion consists of soap bars cast from fists. The soap fists are packed in cartons labeled "Dissolve one, make another," suggesting that once the soap fist has dissolved in one's hand, what is left is not emptiness but rather one's own fist. Displayed along with the cartons of soap is the wooden soapbox in which they were mailed to New Delhi. Spray painted outlines of feet on the soapbox remind one of its other function-as a temporary platform from which impromptu speeches may be given.

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird
In this series of photographic interventions images culled from the US Navy's website, linked to the operations being carried out against pirates in Somalia, are cropped, cut, reassembled and reframed under the headings "Surrender" and "Surround." The lexicon of the sublime landscape is collided with that of military operations. While the sublime landscape is said to surround the viewer thus enticing his soul to surrender, strategic operations are carried out by the navy in order to surround the pirates and force them to surrender.

The ocean is explored as territory that lies outside the realm of governmentality - a site of awe and threat. Day and night enormous quantities of cargo - the embodied process of the distribution of commodities - ply these waters silently, transparently. It is only at the moment of their disappearance that they suddenly become present to us all. Suddenly, when an oil tanker goes missing, its enormous body comes into focus. It is then that the cage goes in search of the bird. Law must be forced upon the lawless in order to make the absent present. In order to, once again, make the present disappear.

Blue Book, Moon Rock
"...(We ought to talk further on about the meaning of "forgetting the meaning of a word")*.
*This he never does. - Edd."[1]

Astronauts returned from their mission in 1969 with photographs and moon rocks. The rock, a dead limb from a dead surface, does not glow. It does not resemble our Moon. And yet photographs and the recorded descriptions of astronauts allow the witness to stitch these fragments of evidence to another (fragmentary) reality.

If, as Vilem Flusser says, "texts are a metacode for images" and codify them, and likewise, photographs are a metacode for texts and are a second degree abstraction, what then happens when a fragmentary reality (the "word," the "rock") collides with the photograph. The moon is the rock. The moon is not the rock. The moon is (not) the light. The light is (not) the photograph.

A promise made in the past, to discuss the meaning of forgetting in the future, is then altogether forgotten. The word. The forgotten word hovers like light bouncing off silver. "Is shiny a color?[2]"

How do we fix an object, dress it, give it a name?

"... The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin..."[3]

And even after the flags have been planted and forced to flutter, the light still plays with our eyes. It eludes us, draws us elsewhere.

"Blue moon
You knew just what I was there for
..."[4]

[1] "The Blue Book," Ludwig Wittgenstein
[2] Joshua Hart, January, 2009
[3] "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," T. S. Eliot
[4] "Blue Moon," Richard Rodgers and Lawrence Hart

Al Aleph
Aleph is the first letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet. The glottal stop which is Alpha, A, the inherent vowel in all consonants in Indic scripts. The Aleph is the numeral "1": the scratch, the stroke, the simplest line that generated significance.

Borges imagined an unimaginable point in space, "El Aleph"-Infinity. A point which revealed everything all at once-everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously. But here we have a problem. What would a viewer actually "see" through such a point. In order to understand a script one must first learn it. That which is significant, is that which is decipherable. Viewers who encounter such a point in space would perhaps find themselves looking at a multiplicity of things and an infinity of noise.

In "El Aleph" Sreshta Premnath attempts to pose this very paradox. Indexical shadows of hairs are projected onto a wall, cycling continuously like an indecipherable script. Are these an alphabet of some kind (a means of signification) or are these just hairs stuck in a projector, impeding our view?

A hair-like delineation (not dissimilar in affect from the Tamil script) occupies a curved chalkboard painted on the wall. Does this correspond to a particular shadow being projected or is this an arbitrary form? Perhaps it is simply a formal study a la Robert Mangold. Perhaps this chalk drawing instigates the viewer to read significance into the projected hairs.

Language as utterance; language as trace; the trace of a body.

A silk-screened grid of math problems are presented to us, which, on closer inspection are all incorrect. There seems to be no logical connection between the problems and their answers. Can a math problem that is wrong, that does not signify "correctly," still be called a math problem? Or are these just garbled numbers arranged in a grid?

A mirror, turned away from the viewer leans against the wall. Is it still a mirror if we cannot see a reflection in it?

A fabricated newspaper is folded over the top of the mirror. On one side of the paper we see an image of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay standing side by side. Two men who scaled the highest peak to survey the expanse of the world for a moment. To plant a flag and then return.

On the other side of the paper, behind the mirror we find the same image inverted-Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. A script is always directional, it is hierarchical, one thing follows another and asserts its importance accordingly. Language is generated by difference, and the two photographs can never be equal.