Current:

Minam A
Sakshi Gupta
Sreshta Premnath
Avinash Veeraraghavan

Curated by Nivedita Magar

In "Current" four young artists explore the cognitive experience of contemporaneity and individuality and their relationship with the constant background radiation of memory, society and the past. Each provides deeply intelligent, inventive and poetic commentary on deep-rooted and recurrent themes with which they grapple. The perspectives range widely, from the breaking with the past to the sustenance afforded by community and tradition; and from the straitjacketing and paranoia associated with modern ideological state apparatuses to the un-mooredness of modern existence. The emotional turbulence of modern life with its simultaneous chaos and joy, the aching consolations of the past, and the struggle to maintain sanity, dignity and centeredness in the midst of modern life permeate and suffuse this collection.

Avinash Veeraraghavan

..And I think, “I am asleep in America too,
And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:
“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be
When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river
Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

From Tony Hoagland- “America”

‘Total Internal Recall” is a gorgeous and complexly layered work in which Avinash Veeraraghavan continues his long standing exploration of the nature of thought and the construction of self in the constitution and reconstitution of experience. Here the artist plays directly with the metaphor of tuning and focus: the ways in which thought and emotion appear to sift through endless repetitive experience and habit and in doing so to assemble a partial and nebulous self. A face with ambivalent emotional affect (sleeping/ at peace or unconscious/exhausted/tormented?) is densely layered with brightly colored light floral patterns and with a repeated, unblinking eye (protective or malevolent?). By the side, a video loops through a tuning of the television where faintly menacing images and sounds collide and mix with others that are everyday and routine . The constant lack of focus mimics the patterns of distraction and ceaseless entertainment that is the staple of modern life and thought. The disturbing and emotionally remote images flick by, as if in a dream, while the face stays stationary and unresponsive to the shatteringly exhausting nature of this exercise, completely devoid of agency.

Aiming somewhere between the confessional and the critical, the artist invites us to ponder and deliberate the fate of the self implied by the tender and vulnerable face. Is it in danger or protected as the images and sounds whirl by? Does the whirlwind around it constitute part of a vast and endless game in which the self is forever forced to be unmoored? Can it ever be whole and lucid? And can it ever be clear to itself?

Sreshta Premnath

War is no longer declared,
only continued. The monstrous
has become everyday.

The medal is awarded
when nothing more happens,
when the artillery falls silent,
when the enemy has grown invisible
and the shadow of eternal armament
covers the sky.
From Ingeborg Bachman- Every Day

In Sreshta Premnath’s sharp and humorous send up of the global war on terror (“Infinite Threat, Infinite Regress”) Bruce Lee comes face to face with the nature of modern warfare. The artist’s concern here is with the neuroses of the individual in the face of the state of perpetual war in which the enemy is said to be an omnipresent unseen menace, always potentially ready to strike. Invoking a famous cultural icon in one of his most famous scenes from “Enter the Dragon”, where the enemy hides in a room of mirrors, this video loop expunges the villain so that Lee becomes an interpellated subject, constantly in a state of tension, unsure where to look to end the nightmare of fear and unable to do so. The only source of information is the ordinal scale of the U.S. terror alert, a flag of ascending colors, near comical in its inability to convey any information of use for action. Like Borges’s famous list of animals, the arbitrariness of the colors and the false order it compels calls to mind the desperate need to classify, control and manipulate; to divide and name in order to control.

Yet, here the categorization is not innocent; the subject is driven to intense fear and paranoia as the colors ratchet up, unsure of how to react. The colors become then a source of a dual regress for the subject. One is the childlike regression and obeisance to a greater authority, a Panopticon whose motives we trust or hope to be benevolent. Another is a more nihilistic regression towards a lack of belief in anything real, driven by the cynicism with the state of things.

The challenge posed is then one of action. The Bruce Lee of “Enter the Dragon” breaks out of the trap by smashing the mirrors, separating the true enemy from this shimmering reflections and eliminating him. But the consolations of a different easier time are no longer available in a time of universal deceit and fear and one in which the very notion of ‘true enemy is’ contingent. How now does one find a way out of the hall of mirrors...?

Minam A

In snow all tracks
-animal and human-
speak to one another,

A long conversation that keeps breaking off
then starting up again.

I want to read those pages
Instead of the kind
made of human words.

I want to write in the language of those
who have been to that place before me.

Animal Languages- Chase Twitchell

Minam Apang’s haunting and elegiac work speaks to the reverberation of myth and tradition in the rootlessness and alienation of modern life. Invoking the place of her birth, the artist draws deeply on the intertwining of landscape and remembrance and the twinning of a fragile beautiful culture with its natural environment. The mountains are doubly alive here, both the source of narrative and a fundamental part of it. Mischievous sprite-like creatures tumble forth telling mysterious tales of ‘original experience’ where narratives are non-linear, and where the creature is a force of nature, untroubled by the restrictions of either formal logic or propriety.

Yet, the cast of this play is not emotionally remote and reflect the artist’s own influences. To quote Joseph Campbell “The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you”. As such, the images are touchingly personal- simultaneously otherworldly and recognizable; connected to infinite and ancient power and yet friendly, even at times comical, and intimate. This dialectical relationship is the core secret reservoir of sustenance provided by community and tradition. The reservoir is open to influence and is not hermetically sealed away, always capable of regeneration.

There is, nevertheless an underlying sense of heartbreak that is also present in this work—the ties that bind, the concealed bridges that sustain, the very connection with the source are faced with an unprecedented assault from modernity. As one moves into a position of a cosmopolitan otherness and the landscape which sustains memory is ‘developed’ away, the chronic alienation of a subject is heightened. In its very nature, the process represses a polytheistic and enchanted past. The work then asks us to consider these tenuous links and to recognize them to be as precious and fragile as they are.

Sakshi Gupta

It was the night of the alligators
the pure, pulsing night
of snouts sticking out of slime 
and from the drowsy swamps 
the dull noise of scale armor 
goes back to the origin of the earth.

And in the depth of the great water
like the circle of the earth 
is the giant anaconda 
covered with ceremonial paint,
devouring and religious.

From “Some Beasts” by Pablo Neruda

A hybrid fan like structure, a powerful beast, possible in the process of moulting and writhing out of its primordial and ancient armour takes center stage in Sakshi Gupta’s installation. Straddling a nebulous line between machine/ animal, impenetrability/ vulnerability, solidity/ephemerality and passivity/ agency, the installation plays with the process of transformation in the modern world. The intensely felt sense of dense materiality and its light intuitive use by the artist suggests several conjoint aspects of contemporaneity which suffuse the work. We observe the mighty creature at a moment of vulnerability though, the sloughing off of the past, and the weariness associated with its burden. Yet, it is raised ( or has it raised itself?) and its rusty weight looks down from a higher, remote vantage point, and in doing so imposes some of the terror and obeisance ceremonially accorded to both the mythical and religious beasts of traditional society and the machines of war today.

In its hybridity and its blurring of the distinctions living and not living, one can sense an echo of the move from the economies of heavy industry to the weightless world of information and the technologies of cybernetics. In the early twenty first century, the idea of the cyborg, part machine-part organism is no longer simply the province of science fiction but increasingly reflected in humankind’s appropriation of nature and technology to its own ends. Yet this creation is different and paradoxically in some senses, more real. Unlike a typically conceived cyborg, created sui generis, without history and having no self identification with nature, here is something which is intimate and vulnerable, shedding itself from a rusty prehistory and an unknown origin. To be truly alive requires, perhaps, to have and to recognize one’s history.

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“These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.” ("The Analytical Language of John Wilkins", JL Borges)