Shadow World: The Question of Being and Nothing, Reflected in Art – GetBengal story
In the world full of objects and ideas along with their lack, is it possible to fathom out the nature of existence and nonexistence through art with the precision almost clinical? Possible or not, why not give it a try? And the PATRON award show in collaboration with gallery T-93 brought me that opportunity. The result is the exhibition titled Shadow World or it can be said to be a series of visuals meant to pose questions piercing deep into the heart of human understanding captured in the two alphabets of “is”.
Indexical-1
The Shadow I Vowed To Cling
If every art has a philosophy behind it, my art takes philosophy of being as its point of departure. Keeping in tune with the spirit of metaphysics, what I felt necessary was to ask some relevant questions in art. For instance, is it possible to have a hole as a constitutive part of a concrete, material object? In Co-constitutive I have presented a ring shaped grindstone. If the hole through it were not there the stone wouldn’t have been a ring, but something else, namely a plain solid disc. But the hole also is there because of the solid rim. If holes are nothing, a lack, or may be an absence, then how could it constitute and be constituted of a material object – namely the grindstone, at the same time? This is the question I wanted to ask the viewer by inscribing “Use the ruler to decide whether nothing makes up something or something makes up nothing. The viewer is also required to find the number of holes in the ring.” on the ruler. This implies the problem of counting holes. What seems like a single hole might be argued to be two - one passing through the front and the other through the back surface of the material.
Indexical-2
Can emptiness be measured straight away? In Loss measures Loss the two pans of the weighing balance come in equilibrium only when the mass of lost water from the pan equals the loss of metal from the other pan. The state of balance appears when the water in the glass is completely emptied.
Is it possible to have impossible figures? What if we take a circle which is a square as well? The two frames of Squarecircle deal with the problem by having a circle and a square consisting of four parts of a circle, where the first equals the latter in area. Figures such as the square-circle don’t exist. But is there no such figure devoid of existence? A distinction between “exists” and “there is” makes the answer clear. There are objects and figures that don’t exist, such is the lesson from the philosophical genius of Alexius Meinong. Otherwise how could you judge a statement like “the square-circle is a beast” as false and “the square-circle is a geometric figure” as true? However, the square-circle is not of the same kind as the winged horse Pegasus, because genetic engineering may produce or astrophysics may discover a Pegasus one day. So, Pegasus is nonexistent yet possible, thus has being. But the logical impossibility of the square-circle keeps it even from having being. If you say square-circles are contradictory then Meinong would say that the law of noncontradiction applies only to things that exist, not to things that don’t.
Squarecircle
Coconstitutive
The Shadow I vowed to Cling is an attempt to capture darkness sealed in twenty boxes from twenty different places. Absence of light makes the content of the boxes unindividuated; but even then each box seems to carry the darkness from an individual spot because nothing has entered it after it was closed.
Tinged with melancholy Indexical embodies my elegiac observation of the way we infer existence from indexical signs of things and people. It’s all about imprints or impressions of actually existing things, that is to say indexical marks that we read out existence from. Those marks may come across as moulds of a sculpture, an organ, photographs, or the stems of flowers offered in memory of a person deceased. Indexical is the mark of wear and tear on a fabric that belongs to man who no longer exists. And stones are the imprints of the earth itself. But beyond the lattice of indexical how to get access to existence in itself? I do not know. Perhaps it is like the dark unknowability held in a goblet. The indexical signs know no difference between the living and the dead.
Loss Measures Loss
For me art speaks a language very similar to philosophy. Hence, I have published a small booklet explaining the philosophical intricacies involved in my art displayed in the exhibition. I’ll consider the exhibition a success if my oeuvre is able to put the question of being in a way worthwhile, and if it is able to show that there are objects in reality that do not exist.
