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Co-incidence of Time and Being

2 person show with Ranbir Kaleka, Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi

On Time as Memory – Video walk-through
Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Rhythmic Interference (chronological excerpts )

 

Projected Animation, Thread and Wire

 

Duration: 14 mins 20 secs

Still from On Time as Rhythmic Interference

 

Projected Animation, Thread and Wire

 

Duration: 14 mins 20 secs

Stills from On Time as Rhythmic Interference

 

Projected Animation, Thread and Wire

 

Duration: 14 mins 20 secs

On Time as Memory- Installation view
Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – details

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – details

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – details

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – Installation view

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – Installation view

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – detail terrazzo flooring

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – detail brick wall

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – detail brick wall

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – detail brick wall

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – details

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – detail

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – details

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – details

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – bathroom mosaic

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – jaali details

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – details

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – details

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – details

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

On Time as Memory – details

 

Synthetic Zari, wire

 

Room size: 30ft X 16ft

Life-size fragmented architectural elements from artist’s ancestral home

Read about this project
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On Time as Memory

The Kintsugi technique of Japan uses gold to repair and accentuate the cracks and breakages in ceramics- highlighting the value in the painful breakdown of the familiar – a visual expression of Rumi’s statement “The wound is where the light enters”. After Indian Saris were old, fraying and done serving their function, they were burned to melt and recover the precious metal from its Zari thread, allowing the gold to resurrect into new forms. Gold’s inert, unchanging nature, its immunity from rust has brought with it connotations of immortality, transcendence and incorruptibility in many cultures.

On Time as Memory invites viewers to walk through the fragmented remains of demolished architectural facades from 33 Link Road – my ancestral home- built in Delhi soon after partition, when my grandparents migrated from Pakistan to India. I have lived in several states and countries but the idea of home was continually tethered to this one “permanent” address. A site of gathering, story-telling, births, deaths, family weddings and sleepovers– this home, a container of potent memories, now awaits its potential for demolition.

What happens to form when it is done serving its function? When private space is broken into and opened, its vulnerable belly laid bare? When the solid, sheltering architectural surfaces of “home” turn into weightless mirages that hover like spectres of memory?

Made in golden “Zari” thread (as an homage to my grandmother’s love of embroidery), to exact life-size dimensions, every nut, bolt, hinge and brick transforms into insubstantial, porous skins challenging the solidity of both – the form and the meaning of ‘home’. The use of gold for these broken forms allows for a dialogue between decay and what lies untouched by entropy, between the ruined and the intact, between the temporary and the permanent, between form and essence. The language of memory finds resonance in these veil-like membranes; flattened as if preserved within the pages of a book.

…….

On Time as Rhythmic Interference

On Time as Rhythmic Interference looks at our relationship to nature and to the rhythms of time we carry within us -primordial, elemental, slow, frantic, structured, eternally determined, measured and relative. The installation consists of a still, skeletal plant form located in the center of time’s swirling shadows.

 

One by one, shadows emerge from the base of the black fern, lengthening and rotating to mark different rhythms of time. The first movement of shadow is a slow, seamless succession of moments that form a smoothly skewing path, spiraling into and growing out of the center -reminiscent of shadows created by the sun on a sun-dial.

This slow, sweeping, elemental rhythm is then joined by a second movement in time, reminiscent of a ticking clock hand – an unvarying shadow that leaps from moment to measured moment, as it systematically marks every degree in the circle of light around the black fern. As time progresses, more shadows appear and the marking of time gets more structured, staccato, and mechanical. Each shadow moves faster than the one before, overlapping and overtaking each other, moving in and out of sync with each other’s rhythms, creating momentary patterns of both – harmony and dissonant asymmetry. As the pace increases, the shadows start to spiral frantically like the blades of a fan building up to a frenzied pitch, which finally causes these shadow rhythms to blur and melt into each other, leaving behind the original rhythm of the first movement.