A report by neha zooni tickoo
“We are all in the gutter, but some
of us are looking at the stars”. – Oscar Wilde
What happens
when an artist thinks of gazing at stars? How commonplace or profound such an
exercise can be? On 20th July 2016, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Saket
hosted yet another ‘coup’ that largely required one of contemplating about the sky.
The guest artist on this day was Rohini Devasher, a visual artist and an
amateur astronomer who dabbles in looking, seeing, observing the “physicality
of field and sight”. Following suit, the conversation begins with not much
talking but allowing the viewers to hear recorded sound piece, called ‘Shadow Walkers’. The sound piece
containing solely the testimonies of people witnessing a full solar eclipse,
allegorically decoded the meanings of “eclipse” where only periphery of their
perceptions and observations are visible through the medium of sound.
What was
rather stimulating in the most subtle ways was the deliberate attempt to set up
the seating arrangement for the evening where the audience had to alternate
their gazes from their left to right, and vice versa. The ‘site’, was shifted
to the peripheries of the sight of the audience, thus decentralizing the very
vantage point. The projected images of Rohini’s artworks on opposing parallel
walls in a dimly lit hall seemed like a set-up in horizon-gazing in the dark.
At the end
of the audio piece, Rohini insists that she deals with “ ‘sight’ as the
physical site”. Clearly her methodology of art making outlines a
phenomenological influence. To heighten the phenomenological experience she admits
to be using advanced tools to “allow the situation to look like what it
eventually becomes”. The end result, she maintains stems entirely from “chance”
since it is collective perception devoid of becoming something definitive. Here
she recalls Lorraine Daston, a historian of Science, and the author of Wonder and the Order of Nature, and
paraphrases it’s central thought as “strange objects, strangely seen by strange
people”.
In line, she
also expounds on how in the history of human explorations, she identifies her
field notes as “recordings” and not “Records”. She distinguishes among both by
saying that the former allows the data to be raw and which is not formalized
and the latter aims to delineate a pre-defined truth. The “recording” for her
is then brings articulation of Record which allows speculation and gives scope
to the “what-if”. Further she tells us that ‘speculation’ comes from the root
word ‘specular’ which means the mirror, again leading us towards her focus on
sight as the core instrument, medium and the product.
Talking
about her Monographed Geographies
(2013), a series of hybrid prints, she attempts reimagining the physical
terrain superimposed by patterns overlaid by pencil drawings. She achieves
similar distortions in her other work called Atmospheres (2015), a single channel video shot from a fish-eye
lens of the care sky which becomes her canvass while giving an impression that
the sky itself becomes the blue planet that Earth is. This artwork potently
attempts to draw the gaze inwards by looking at the bleakness of the sky, and
challenging the notion of the anthroposcene. Helioblue (2015), a single channel long durational video piece, also
traces her piercing gaze from down-top orientation, measuring the blue-ness of
the sky itself. Moving further in the discussion, there is also the mention of
Paul Virilio, the French culture theorist of speed, technology and wars, and
the author of Open Sky in the context
of describing the constantly altering vantage points of a parachutist in a free
fall from the sky.
Shifting her
gaze from the sky, she treads back to the horizontal surfaces of the blue oceans,
she talks of her work based in the UK called Shivering Sands (2016) – part of the show Archaeologies of the Future, a single channel film infused with a
contrapuntal narrative of unused and rusting British watch towers installed at
the time of World War II to foresee any naval attacks; and then of the expanses
of the ocean, using again the phenomenological yet poetic reading of it. The
work demarcates an understanding and speculation of structures that have been
made to appear strange given the expanse of their time and space of
existence.
Finally she shows
us the work where she images the world as a green planet, and not just blue. Terrasphere (2015) is a series of images
shot of miniature ecosystems covered in glass that uniquely give an impression
of a green plant, complete with its flora and the atmosphere. She states that
here “the subject of study is the surface of the object”. At this point Akansha
added that Rohini’s work lingers on the heterotopic subversion of imagining
sight as as an alternative space. In view of this particular work by Rohini,
she recalls the work of a Puerto Rican artist, Raphael Martinez Ortiz had
installed a miniature of Amazon rain forest inside the museum. The conversation
continued towards, how the particular exhibition was like a container of the
“viewpoints of moisture”. It is rather intriguing that with Rohini’s object of
enquiry being sight, in Terrasphere, the
same becomes invisible vapors of moisture condensed underneath the glass
surface.
At this
moment the discussion was thrown open to the audience. One of the members
pointed out that in the sound piece ‘Shadow
Walkers’, since one is bereft of the sight, the audio piece is basically a
recording of phenomenologically enhanced responses, emerging as a conscious act
in wonder making. Ms. Roobina Karode, Director KNMA, noted the act of wonder
making in the event of weather forecast and news dissemination. At this
juncture, acclaimed art critic and curator Geeta Kapur ruminated about the
origins of the term ‘spectacular’ rooted in philosophy and arising from
‘specular’ , meaning – mirror and eventually leading to the tangent of Lacanian
psychoanalytic and then finally towards Rohini’s phenomenological position conceptually. The
discursive angle of her interjection was to contextualize Rohini’s play with
sight and act of seeing to immediate materiality and experientiality that one
gets encountered with in her work. Artist Vivan Sundaram present among the
audience wanted to know if Rohini envisages the materiality of sight to be in
constant entropy. To this she replied that perhaps it is so. However, she confessed that what worries her
is a loss of wonder. Having had acquainted herself with the anthroposcene, she
gradually mediates between the undeniable recklessness of the human species
with the environment and the urgency to sustain the unique capacity of wonder,
curiosity, ingenuity and phantasmagoria of the human mind.
