MEDIUM: Performance | Web | Installation
YEAR: 2021
‘How long does it take for an eye to dissolve in the forgotten river?’ looks into the stories, myths and fables as an entry point to reimagine the cartographies in a state of exception. It takes narrative response to problematize the ideas of landscape, its memories, histories and contestations. It looks for alternative ways to historicize a place, not necessarily anthropocentric. It enquires how does territory in the state of exception speak of silence ? What are the echoes that emerge from such places? how do these stories act and respond to other tales, objects, and species?
The gamut of images, objects, and texts hence produced through my intervention as a walk into these territories are used to map out and translate the interrelated patterns which coexist between landscape, socio-political culture, modes of resistance, and subjective apprehension. The result is a rhizome with multiple entry and exit points and not a specific, linear access.
Time: Unknown Date: Unknown
Place: Unknown
Unknown
How long does it take for an eye to dissolve in the forgotten river? One faces this question at the beginning of this journey where one enters a territory of the unknown. The only known markers in this space are the graves of the unknown. Very little is known about these graves and the bodies in them, of men, women and children, their death and even less is known about their lives. There are numbers etched on the epitaphs of each grave. 1,2,3,…, 1846,…,1930,… 2710, …, 2810,…. 6000,… The remains in these graves were never identified and it is unknown if anyone remembers them in life. We know this land has eaten up thousands, and thousands more it will. We also know….
But at several other places that are open fields, pastures, meadows and rivers, it is also unknown who killed them? A date of burial and a number as a count is all that remains of these ‘dead’ in a timeless place where countless such graveyards exist. In this place, to be born is to be wrong; to be wrong is to be convicted and to be convicted is to be liable for abandonment in life and death. And to be obscured to the voids between forgetfulness and memory.
We shall continue our journey to seek …
1727hrs Wed, 01 September 2021
Nakkad Pal, Danizab
In a legend, a deluge destroyed everything in Kashmir and spared the mountains. The whole of Kashmir was effaced and turned into a sea. As the roar of waters settled, the ocean that formed came to be called Satisar. An old sage narrates this tale in the middle of a dense forest. He speaks of it like it is happening. Time is a farce for him. That is how it ought to be narrated. Like it is happening.
Why does Kashayap break forth the Himalayas, and drain the water from the lake? Or kill Jalodbhava? Is that how the land becomes habitable?
KHOJ Peers Open Day
Supported by KHOJ International Artists Association.
Something like falling off the world
Forde, L’Usine, Geneva
Photographs: Théa Giglio
