Stone Landscapes of
Burning Stars; Redefine and Camouflage
-The Curatorial defined by Actions Collaboration,
Performance and Video.
An unfamiliar road, the Sumos on the slippery tracks, an
exhausting bus journey. Several directions of roads through forests some of
them have check points. Mud covers the front window we drive forward blindness.
A tire got punctured at 3 pm in the night on the 28th hour bus
journey from Guwahati to Agartala. The swirling roads made me dizzy and the
night before I had been throwing up because I could not digest the momos with
pork meat. Yet, at the end of the road I arrived at an unfamiliar city that
opened up a new narrative.
“The conversations with students who are artists and artists
who could be possible students.“
Different perspectives through stars at night. Playing with
the city lights.
We formed groups within these formations new thought
processes were created.
As a curator I was the participant of this collaborative
thought of what yet had to come. Sometimes the dying murdered women, sometimes
the chef mixing up visuals, sometimes an unexpected scream, sometimes just
breathing in fresh air and writing a note. Sometimes mute, observing, a student.
The politics of the space reappears as a visual trace in the
landscape as a mark of ink written on the body. Without emphasizing on
political issues of the North East states the dialogues evolves, naturally expressing
things in subtle ways, secluded in the personal studio space or a tree house. Something
not served as a ready-made statement, one has to discover traces by spending
time with the displayed work.
We were listening to the description of the memories of a
student. Slowly the words transfigured and we all felt the intense lightness of
his memory that flowed together with the wind caressing the leaves visible from
the tree house.The sound flowed together with the city sounds that we could
hear from the top of the hill. I thought of the city as a sea I had dived into
and from this tree house we heard the waves of sound breaking on the shore. I
felt amalgamation of thoughts as materials, empty papers that with the touch of
writing and slender movements produced various visual scribbling, later this transformed
into performances and video works.
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Sometimes a scream was disorienting and confronting me with clashing
characters. Lost in diverse routes and roads the potential of different
projects never have ended and broke this geographical barrier. Something new
was born and these different thought processes could be sustainable somehow.
After residing in Kochi, these experiences captured with video and photography were
edited in new forms and visions with a team of four people- Nupur Nanal,
Radhika Murthy, Renuka Soraisam and Lalthlanchhuaha. In this way, setting up
the works as well as editing the works of 51 persons from 5 states- Assam,
Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram and Manipur- has been a collaborative process as
well. Using this method, the format collided with the way the material was
created in the first place. The work stays in continuous flux of different
thoughts. New initiatives within this rich cacophony of sound and visuals projected
on the walls of Kottacherry Brothers are deriving from the North East to the
South.