| Engaging the NOWHERE Having been acquainted with Darshana Vora's paintings, videos, site-specific installations, and poetry in the course of the last three to four years, one tends to notice the elegant austerity of her production that is a sign of prolonged meditations on the theme of perception, subjectivity, and inter-subjectivity. At a glance these works appear to border on the minimal where concepts and ideas are presented as delicate mental diagrams side-stepping elaborate visual embodiment. But after a relatively extended exposure one realises that they might have more in common with the phenomenologist's quest for microscopic quanta of perception and meaning. Concurrently, they also translate into discernible spaces where gestures and expressions are effectively disassociated with surgical precision from their sources, then vaporised and condensed to essences ushering in the metaphysical. Fortunately, this kind of aesthetic atomism' which could easily get one mired in exclusivity and incoherence, is offset by the artist's emphasis on meaning generating situations rather than the fundamental components of the experience itself. Consequently, the form of discourse analysis apparent in her video studies which take into account the role of context in the on going process of meaning generation becomes the key to apprehending Darshana's work. The present body of work 'Engaging the Nowhere' copes with the fact that nothing is absolutely static, and the universe is forever in motion. The continual mutation, dislocation, and migration occurring all around us is brought into the an object itself giving it the ability to shape shift forcing us to re-examine our taken for granted notions about the world. Intentionally or otherwise, questions regarding freewill, the chaotic inner dynamics of organic systems as well as metaphysical pondering about the prime cause that set everything in motion in the first place are implied in these works. Conversely, it could be also read as invoking the obvious `Other', the imposed order attempting to establish stasis, solidity, and permanence in the otherwise interminable Flux. 'Engaging the NowHere' resolves itself through a subliminal oscillation between such binaries to bring forth the turbulence that is not apparent in our day to day experience of the world. By abolishing geographical and chronological references as a strategy to locate her work in an ever present claustrophobic 'Now', Darshana presents the viewer with more than a phenomenological or cognitive space where sensory data and categories are pitted against each other. In their engagement with understanding reality as meaningful encounters, these works translate into peak experiences that could very well be categorised along with the experience of `Satori' in Zen Buddhism. An expenence that transcends the circular logic that mark intellectual comfort zones and unravels a lexicon of experiences within a timeless space that is neither exclusively private nor public. Baiju Parthan Bombay 1999 (Baiju Parthan is a painter, computer geek, and an occasional writer. He hopes that some day he would crack the code to attaining an anomalous non-linear existence.) essay for exhibition 'Engaging the NOWHERE', British Council Gallery, Mumbai 1999 |
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