In You is the Illusion of Each Day

13.10.2011-05.11.2011 A Curatorial Program by Maya Kvskaya, PhD

2011 Maya Kvskaya. All Rights Reserved.

In you is the illusion of each day. You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers. You undermine the horizon with your absence. Eternally in flight like the wave. You gather things to you like an old road. You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices. I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated that had been sleeping in your soul. ~Pablo Neruda, excerpt from Your Breast is Enough

Opening 13 October, 2011

Exhibition on view till 5 November, 2011

Artists
Dilip Chobisa Neha Choksi Han Bing Pooja Iranna Ranbir Kaleka Niyeti Chadha Kannal Sonia Khurana Malekeh Nayiny Prajakta Potnis Raqs Media Collective Kartik Sood Michael Zheng

In You is the Illusion of Each Day

Maya Kvskaya, PhD

In you is the illusion of each day. You arrive like dew on the petals. You undermine the horizon with your absence. Eternally breaking, fugitive like a wave Welcoming like an old, well-trodden road, you are peopled by echoes and nostalgic voices. I awoke, and at times birds that slept in your soul rise to flee and migrate1 ~Pablo Neruda The world is as much inside us as it is outside. In You is the Illusion of Each Day draws its title and thematics from a poem by Pablo Neruda, who understood our deep human need to feel intimately and inextricably connected to the world outside of each of us. At the nexus of the binaries of the material and the ideational; the organic and humanly constructed; appearance and so-called reality; lies a powerful force that weaves these antinomies together, binding them into meaningful, coherent wholes, and making them as much a part of us as we are a part of the world in which they are anchored. That force is imagination and the illusions it generates. Erasing the clear dividing line between these binaries, the power of illusion reveals itself to be the very stuff of life that animates the inanimate, giving meaning to mere material, and making the dumb Things of this world into something far more than simple Objects. Through the power of illusion, which resides in each of our imaginations, the world of mute, lifeless Things becomes a space of Life, becomes our own, takes root inside of us and thus becomes a constitutive part of us. Far from being escapist denials of the world and life, illusions can breathe life into everything around us, and function as the connective tissue joining us with our external world. In each of the works in the exhibition, the artists come at the question of illusions and their place and function in our lives from their own set of larger conceptual preoccupations and with their characteristic visual languages. A look at the works shows the vast diversity of interpretations of illusion and the roles it can play in our lives. Like Ordinary Language philosopher Wittgensteins family resemblances, the works in the show are connected through cross-cutting, overlapping strands of affinity and resonance, rather than through a single characteristic or common element, in the same way that family members resemble each other but each differently, and uniquely.
Pablo Neruda. 1924. Excerpt from the poem Your Breast is Enough, Transl. Amjad Majid, originally published in Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair).
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When Iranian artist Malekeh Nayiny was studying in the US in the 70s, the revolution in Iran made it difficult for her to return home. Almost a decade and a half later, when her mother was on her deathbed, she had still not been able to return to her native land. Upon learning of her mothers illness, she flew to Tehran, but it was too late; her mother was gone. After the funeral, sifting through her mothers personal belongings brought a deluge of memories and associations. The mute, meaningless everyday objects that her mother had saved, become precious repositories of memory, emotion and affect, and so she kept pieces of her mothers life as reminders of what she had lost and could never recover. Nayinys photographic diptych, Traces (2000), is an attempt to come to terms with what she lost both her mother and an entire world, which she had inhabited with her family since childhood. It was lost not only to her, but to the entire country where she was born. The place was still Tehran, but it was a new place. The objects in the world were often familiar, but their meaning had been fundamentally altered by the new regime. The illusion of continuity was shattered by the reality of the new valences taken on by the external world, and the new associations invested them with new sets of meaning and different significations. No longer were her illusions of self and family in sync with the world she had left behind. The rain of old family photos, and the pile at her feet in the work, came to represent the passage of time as well as a lost time and lost people. The presence of the absent in the traces they left behind serves to underscore the ways in which the world can become a different place through the reordering of the dominant principles that gave coherence and meaning to what would otherwise simply be a mountain of meaningless matter. It is the power of illusion that enables us to ties these disparate things together into something called a life. Dilip Chobisas two Untitled (2011) mixed media works were made in response to the Neruda poem. Thinking visually about the interplay between inside and out, the organic and the humanly made, as well was the boundaries separation the putative real from the illusory, Chobisa used graphite on paper, a digital print, and wire to make a dioramic work, and crafted a three-dimensional illusion characteristic of his visual language. In both works, a room in our foreground is separated from the outside by an archway that is fenced off with a length of barbed wire. In one work, a tumultuous cloudscape broods on the horizon, in the other a walkway leads to a tree that is growing in the shape of a mans head. Inside and outside interpenetrate and bleed over the symbolically policed boundaries, placed at the gateway between worlds. Michael Zhengs Utopia (2004) continues his trademark conceptual play with the way optical illusion can become the site of interactive engagement with the viewer. Indeed, this seemingly simple work achieves an incredible (in the literal sense of the word) labour of defamiliarisation, rendering a commonplace object the site of delightful surprise and revelation at the power of our perceptions to transform an object with our minds. The viewer apprehends a bizarre looking objecttiny, mottled greyish white, rounded like a stone or a small hunk of bread, but clearly neitherperched on the edge of an oversized pedestal near the wall. Playing on knowledge and how our preconceptions structure our modes of seeing, the strange appearance of this object disrupts our familiar perceptive mechanisms. Only upon close inspection from all angles, made difficult by the placement of the work, can the viewer ascertain that it as a part of a book, sanded down into a form that is
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nearly unrecognizable. The illusion, Zheng shows us, is in each of us, not the object, and the Gestalt switch, facilitated by our re-cognition (our thinking again), transforms the strange back into the familiar once more. In Neha Choksis Act V: Queen of the Night (2011), the dramatic form of a common Raati Rani sapling tree stands stately against an emerald green and black curtain. The black and white leaves and stalk raise questions about the medium of the work. At first it appears to be a painting, and in a sense it is, but not the usual sort, and at the same time it appears to be a work of photography. Playing on illusion through multiple sleights of hand, the artist has taken a live plant and meticulously painted it with verisimilitude in black and white, adding a fully painted leaf, then photographing it against a theatrical backdrop, and finally making handwritten annotations on the photographs. This piece follows and builds on her earlier works that manipulate perception and meditate on presence and absence, sedimentation of meaning and erasure, questions of representation, and investigate the status of the real and the illusory. By causing the real plant to disappear beneath the layer of paint that displaces it, the apparent absence of that which is paradoxically, actually present foregrounds its displacement, the slippage between the two and what has been lost. Like many other works in the show that present illusions in their duplications, dualities and interplay or juxtaposition of doubles, Choksi asks us to imagine what it might mean to represent a representation: You realized you were looking at a representation of the real superimposed upon and smothering the real. You might have wondered at the saplings beauty, its perfection, and its blemish-free sheen. You realized it was pornography and that you liked it. You probably cared for deviants anyway. You cared for its survival, once you realized it was painted. Limning multiple mediums, the work is part sculpture, part painting, part photo, part text. The artists inscription reads: Act V: Queen of the Night, in which the tragic protagonist observes her own pain without asking to be saved. KEEP IN VIEW: To become an approximation. The perfect template. KEEP FRONTAL: A fundamental, essential self. Impossible love object. SIGH, CONTENT. Now blush. Be in place. Drained of color. Keep no distance. Speak a fingertouch with heightened emotion. She is hushed inside. Pooja Irannas Everything is Not Straight (2011) offers a stark visual contrast to Choksis drama of the painted plant. Meticulously built out of ordinary office staple pins, Iranna has created the illusion of an urban skyline, populated by gleaming, metallic high-rise buildings. Defying binaries, her metal structure is both as strong and as fragile as the underlying industrialized order that has produced the spectacle of cityscapes that jut into the firmament with their skyscrapers, posing as iconic edifices of the seemingly unshakeable permanence of our way of life. In her Untitled 111 (2010) digital print, the unfinished faade of an urban megabuilding dominates the frame. What is striking is the way in which this could be a scene from anywhereit could be China just as easily as India. We sometimes imagine an incommensurability of our various worlds, delimited and bounded at the artificial, imaginary boundary of the Nation State. The commonality of the processes, vicissitudes and lived experience of modernization, however, as well as the existential dilemmas posed by our current, urbanized imaginings of what modernity must be, are as real as the illusions of each day that keep us on the track of perpetuating the extant dominant shared vision of our world, instead of reimaging and re-enacting another. Chinese artist Han Bing depicts the illusions of each day that fuel Chinas mad race for modernity in his Urban Amber (2005-2011) series of single exposure photographs. Shooting
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ordinary scenes and architectural structures from everyday life along the banks of urban China's reeking "stinky rivers"pollution-glutted, garbage-infested canals full of industrial waste, human and animal faeces, white non-biodegradable trash, plastic bags, syringes, drink bottles, he captures both the detritus and the dream in a single image. These inverted reflections capture images of degraded nature in a pond where plastic trash floats alongside lotus leaves, or exquisite ancient Chinese hand-carved marble "coiled dragon pillars" surrounded by modern rubbish, and crumbled bits of white Styrofoam, oil and chemical factory sewage. The gleaming, glass and steel high-rises and commercial centres of the propertied nouveau riche, and the ramshackle shanties of the urban poor and rural migrants, alike, are distorted by the pollution and waste in the dark water. In this series of startlingly ethereal, yet foreboding images, we see at once Chinas dreams of becoming a modernized, urbanized, industrialized, globalized, propertied new nation, and simultaneously, the fictive, illusory nature of these dreams. Floating in the skies of these inverted images are the filthy refuse and toxic by-products of our own excesses and myopic desire. Like amber's capacity to capture the sediment of the times, Urban Amber shows the dystopian face the illusions of our modernity and consumptive excess that have both wrought and fraught our world. Ever trenchant and articulate, Raqs Media Collective describes their projected video loop in the following manner: A sailor, a prostitute, a city, the search for warmth, and a slice of snatched time; Shore Leave (2010-2011) is a short story in words and images, about words and the unsaid, about desire and the incalculability of longing. In this piece, projected into a gilded frame, hung on a bordello red wall, photographic images and video animation intersect with textual narrative. Transforming the prosaic visit of a sailor to a prostitute from pedestrian clich to poetic re-imagining of the possibilities for human intimacy in a context of urban anomie and globalized dislocation, Raqs uses the familiar story-board-style condensed narrative to relocate that dislocation and, if only ephemerally, ameliorate that anomie. They mobilize the power of illusion to create the connective tissue that conjoins souls that briefly touch in the most alienating of contextsthe transactional sexual encounterwithout sentimentality, offering a polyvalent picture of the worlds inhabited by their protagonists, and showing that the possibility of human warmth can be conjured up in the midst of such urban anomie, even as is tenuous, fragile and often fleeting. Deriving from the Greek for life (zoe) and turn (tropos), the zoetrope is a device that produces the optical illusion of movement from a set of static images. Originating in China circa 180 AD, the prototype for the zoetrope was then called the The Tube that Makes Illusions into Reality,2 and the modern version was invented in the early 19th century and was given the popular moniker of Wheel of the Devil.3 The first cinematic projection of moving images was produced with a version of zoetrope in the late 19th century. Sonia Khuranas zoetrope brings multiple layers of illusion beyond the optical, inhabiting a poetry of presence and absence, with its cyclical loop of animated embodiment, perpetually renewed by the viewers own vision. Incorporating still, sequential photography in the
Ronan, Colin A; Joseph Needham. (1985). The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 2. Cambridge University Press, pg. 123. 3 "Zoetrope." Laura Hayes and John Howard Wileman Exhibit of Optical Toys. 2005. The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.
2

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zoetrope evokes shades of silent film in an interactive sculptural form, as viewers animate the zoetrope with hands-on engagement and bring their own imaginaries to the reading of the simulated action within. Thus, in a performative mode, the artist offers an interactive spectacle that engages the viewer corporeally, visually and conceptually. Dressed up as the artists imagined representation of the legendary diva, Egyptian singer Aum Koulsum (Oum Kolsum), whose soaring operatic vocal performances aurally inhabit a gestural repertoire of extravagant glamorous hyperbole, Khurana re-enacts the singers performances with the soundless language of her body and facial expression, connecting the aural with the visual through the imagination of the viewer and the mechanism of the zoetrope. Adding a layer of complexity, Khurana is dressed in high camp fashion, conjuring up images of a drag queen, yet the spectre of a woman in drag as a man performing a theatricalised femininity ruptures simple unilinear narratives of representation. In re-enacting the imagined ethos of Koulsum, channelled through the icon of a double-drag diva, she shatters the binary of exteriority and interiority by making the interior state she embodies functionally substitute for the exterior. In her pair of No Title (2011) rapidograph drawings done in pen and acrylic on paper, Niyeti Chadha Kannal takes the theme of illusions to an abstract plane. Rendering simple images in black and gray on white, the artist explores the possibility of objects beyond their material physicality. Using ordinary objects such as gossamer fabric or crumpled paper as her starting point, she deconstructs the image into its component formal properties, distilling the most elusive, ghostly traces of what she imagines to be its spatialised being. Rather than representing the absent object, the works play on the structural presence of the object that she transforms with both her gaze and the move of mind that re-envisions it in this new form. In doing so, she meditates on the embodied relationship between presence and absence, seeing and knowing, as well as abstraction and representation. Prajakta Potnis works are bursting with the power of illusion. Her paintings depict pillows whose polka dots have spread like measles to the walls; chairs whose legs are stockinged with the texture of the floor; or floors whose flat stone surface is studded with stalagmite-like growths rising from the patterns in the flooring. This resonates with the visual language of her site-specific installations, in which the artist transforms everyday features of the built environment with subtle interventions. She alters the walls of a room into a surface resembling pocked human skin; she infects fans, light fixtures, and other quotidian household objects with viral growths; the holes of an electrical outlet meander down the wall, like little footprints leading away from the socket; plaits of hair form the cord of an electrical plug. Her works are rife with images that hint at breakdown, infection and uncontainable contagion, interpenetration, permeability, and the porosity of the interface between our spaces, objects and life itself. Skins, membranes, holes, and cracks are apposite metaphors in her work for walls, barriers and boundaries and their antithesis. In her sitespecific intervention for Illusions, Potnis has covered the stairwell with a web of threads that creates the illusion of spreading fissures. The very structures that house everyday life and art are riddled with cracks in the illusion of their stability. The metaphor of walls on the verge of collapsing around us evokes the potential presence of their absence, mirroring the hidden fissures in the structures of our everyday world, and the social arrangements that form an order to our lives, which are as permeable, malleable and frail. What might seep through these cracks? What lies on the other side? The possibility of breakdown in the division between inside and outside, between the organic and inorganic interpenetration of inside and out, is visually embodied in the porosity of the walls that divide usand by metonymic
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extension, the binaries that cleave us from each other as wellthe in from the out, the public from the private. Perhaps their stability of these divisions is merely illusory, and yet, by the same token, perhaps it is precisely those illusions that make stability possible at all. Just as Sonia Khurana drew on her imaginings of an Egyptian diva for her zoetrope, the sitespecific installation, Moist Fear (2011), offered by Kartik Sood draws its inspiration from the artists imagining of the setting and ambiance in a story by Vladimir Nabokova fictive fiction, as it were. He imaged the palpable discomfort of a scene that he describes thus: a man is sitting in a room, nearly at the end of his life, contemplating. He is slowly breathing his last breaths and he waits for something to happen that does not take place, and so he dies starved of the magical act that could have liberated his obscure fear. Everything in the room shifts for a moment and this new reality endures. Channelling this eerie ambience of the familiar made strange that features in many of Nabokovs works, Sood created a surreal setting comprised of material dualities. The contrast between sleek smooth materials, such as rectilinear sheets of black glass, and sculptural objects made to appear antiquea weathered wooden horse, his fathers old kerosene lantern, wooden architectural objectssuggests a chaotic sensual friction and exudes a sense of spatiotemporal disjuncture. A quilt lies rumpled on the floor with a small antique lamp glowing in the centre. An old chair protrudes from the wall. Soods delicate, subtly disturbing paintings, made of multiple layers of ink wash and shadowy images on silk, line the wall in his room of illusions. The space breathes and the juxtaposition of textures evokes a jumble of uneasy sensations and emotions. In Ranbir Kalekas photography with oil painting on canvas, Contested Desires II (2009), a group of working class men are gathered gazing at a horizon, demarcated by a distant, barely visible motorway. A silvery flock of birds streak across the sky before them. On the ground behind them lies the twisted carcass of a dead pheasant. The glimmer of its jewel-toned feathers belies its lifeless state. It embodies glorious possibility brought to a crushing, crashing cessation. If there are parallels to be drawn between the men and the birds, one can also say that the image bespeaks a certain metaphysics of time, in which the crumpled dead fowl that lie behind the group of men could be signs of what could have been but failed to come to fruition, while the streaming flock straining against the borders of the firmament can be seen as semaphores of what still might be. Either way, Kalekas men are travellers or migrants, and they gaze at the imaginary space of desire that takes flight like the soaring flock above, flying we know not where, driven by their illusions of what their lives might be. While the work was not made in response to the Neruda poem, the resonance is haunting, and we see the birds that slept in [their] soul[s] rise to flee and migrate. In Kalekas video painting installation, Sweet Unease (2010-2011), two oil paintings are brought to illusory life by projection. A darkened grey space is illuminated by the projections onto the paintings and a textured surface in between them. On the surface of the two paintings, moving images merge and morph, creating a haunting tableau of doubled, shifting images. For Kaleka, food is carries the symbolic significance of life, as it sustains and passes through us in a cyclical pattern, not unlike the cyclicality of Sonia Khuranas rotating zoetrope. The eating man stands for all of us, in our most bare biological state. This man is peopled by echoes and nostalgic voices, as Neruda wrote in the poem above. Here these echoes and nostalgic voices are the different parts of the self, which emerge like phantoms from the body of the eating man who sits in both left and right canvases in the installation. In between the quotidian scenes of the eating man consuming his meal, these various
2011 Maya Kvskaya. All Rights Reserved. www.mayakovskaya.com

incarnations of the self rise and leave behind the painted form of man to enter the intermediary space between the canvases to wrestle, spar and struggle with one another. The disruptions that call these multiple incarnations of the same man away from his perpetual meal are the sorts of internal struggles with the questions of everyday life with which we all grapple, as that which is out of balance inside of ourselves is externalized and made flesh, or the fragile balance between our interiorities and the outside world is disturbed.

Illusion, understood in the way Neruda imagined it, and explored in its myriad modalities through the works in the exhibition, can never be reducible to a signifier of falsity, as is often done in the popular lexicon. Instead, it becomes a site where the real is fabricated by each of us, individually and jointly, by sleight of hand, twist of face, optical illusion or conscious re-imaginings and re-visions. Whatever happens out there only becomes real to each of us when it exists inside us as well. Thus, illusion, and its power to enable us to connect the inside and the outside and make present that which is absent, is one of the great powers innate to human beings. Yet with great power also comes great risks, and sometimes our illusions become delusions, or we imagine ourselves in ways that are out of sync with the rest of the world, causing rupture and, ironically, sometimes disillusionment and disconnection, as we have seen in a number of the works, where the imbalance between our insatiable desires and the sustainable realities of a world that is exists both inside and outside of us, precisely because it is shared with others as much as inhabited by ourselves. How to fold the world into ourselves and ourselves into the world is one of the great existential challenges of the human condition. How will we face this challenge? Perhaps by marshalling our illusions of the best that we can be, and holding them up as a standard by which we judge ourselves, our histories and future generations.

2011 Maya Kvskaya. All Rights Reserved. www.mayakovskaya.com

Michael Zheng

Utopia, Mixed Media Installation with sanded down book, pedestal (size variable), viewer participation, 2004

Neha Choksi

Detail

Queen of the Night, Collage of three parts of a black and white painted in front of a green curtain, modified with over-drawings, scrawls, paint, notes, 80 x 18 inches,

Dilip Chobisa

UNTITLED graphite on paper, glass, charcoal, digital print, painted wooden frame, 2x2 feet, 2011

UNTITLED graphite on paper, glass, charcoal, digital print, painted wooden frame, 2x2 feet, 2011

Pooja Iranna

UNTITLED 111 DIGITAL PRINT ON ARCHIVAL PAPER SIZE: 107 X 162cm (42.3x 63.7 inches)

Niyeti Chadha Kannal

No Title, Size: 60x48 inches, Medium: Rapidograph, Acrylic on Paper

No Title, Size: 60x48 inches, Medium: Rapidograph, Acrylic on Paper

Prajakta Potnis New Site-Specific Intervention

in the stairwell/doorways

Han Bing

Coiled Dragon Pillars: Urban Amber, Photography, 20 x 30 inches, 2007

Withered Lotus: Urban Amber, Photography, 40x60 inches, 2008

Sun in the East: Urban Amber, Photography, 20 x 30 inches, 2007

Kartik Sood

Moist Fear, Mixed media, site-specific installation: paintings on paper and semitransparent cloth, wood, glass, ceramic. Dimensions variable, 2011.

Details

Malekeh Nayiny

Traces, Photography (diptych), 43.4 x32 inches (each), 2000

Ranbir Kaleka

Contested Desires, Photoprint & oil painting on canvas, 55 x 73 inches, 2009

Sweet Unease Oil and Acrylic on Canvas with video projection Length : 11 min 11 sec loop Size : 157 cm x 280 cm Size of Each canvas : 156 x 90 cm each Year : 2010-2011

Sonia Khurana

Zoetrope, kinetic object of simulated performance, 5 1/2 feet high, wood, paint, metal, turntable, photographs
Approximate dimensions and material dimensions: 62-ht, 48-diameter,16 photographic images: 24x 32 Upper drum: Diameter: 4 feet. Height 2 1/2 feet. Open at the top. Base of the upper drum: a heavy piece of circular wooden base, 4 feet in diameter. Material used for the walls: light metal : aluminium. Turn-table mechanism: Custom-made single pivot axle around which the drum rotates, when set in motion. (An initial push activates the motion, and thenceforth, the drum continues to move for a while by the force of its own weight and motion.) Lower stand: Diameter approx. .3 feet. Height : 2 3/4 to 3 feet. A heavy, metal rod. With stand. Lower base: wood

Shore Leave, Single Channel Digital Slide Show Projection onto wall within gilded a frame, 2010/2011.
Single channel video projection, high def, vertical projection, 4000 lumens projector, minimum. Framing (in ornate gold and wood), 3-5 inches thick. Projected image size inside frame: 4x3 feet exactly, wall around the project covered with ornate wall paper.
Shore Leave
Images + Text

Raqs Media Collective

First published in TAKE on Art, ed. Bhavna Kakar, 2010

installation images

installation images

installation images

Dont part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you will have ceased to live. ~Mark Twain

For enquiries, please contact:

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