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Piyali Ghosh, Deep in Roots 4, drawing on silk and moulded acrylic sheet, 95.9 X 29.9 inches, 2016. Image courtesy: Latitude 28.

Rendering Multitudes

 

Conceptualised by Adwait Singh

 

Artists: C. Bhagyanath & Piyali Ghosh

Exhibition dates: 10 February – 14 March, 2017
Venue: Gallery Latitude 28, New Delhi.

C Bhagyanath, Secret Dialogue 5, Charcoal, colour pencil and watercolour on garware polyester film translucent paper, 48 X 43 inches, 2017.  Image courtesy: Latitude28

Trance/It  (duration: 25 minutes) performed by Deepak Kurki Shivaswamy and Manju Sharma. Photo credit:  Sanjay Kumar.

Dear Osiris,

 

Look what he did to you.

 

I have cast myself to the winds, prospecting far and wide in search for the lost parts. The memory of your vibrant body shattered into 42 fragments and broadcasted abroad have rent my mind into 42 different vectors with ceaseless quarry and nights squandered on insomnia. Your voice arriving through a wormhole utters commandments unto my waking dreams, settling into my bones as automated calls to action. I have followed it in the passage of a cloud’s shadow over the prairie, till the prairie itself was no more and in its place appeared a thriving metropolis. Then the metropolis was garbled in its meaning like a curdled tongue and new logistical and epistemological imaginaries divined to stabilise the flickering reality. I have traced it across the developing drafts of Orlando’s fledgling poem and amidst the roots of the very oak tree. I have set watch by the perambulating beam of the light house, mudlarking on the shore for a glimmer of your glorious selves caught between the vagrant motes of irradiated dust. I have sought you under the weight of novelty. The spaces between the words have yielded nothing so far either, however slowly I might read them and though the integrated spaces have swelled into an expanding infinity comprising the elusive ‘elsewhere’ where I find myself now and our story still beating inside my dimming heart, I come up against the wall of resounding silence confirming perhaps your departure or never-presence or an entire library of possibilities that can slip in between. I have come undone and it’s all backwards now, whatever ‘backwards’ is (for time here flows in all directions and velocities; there being no bookmarks). I am (not)alone here with just these non-linear thoughts to weary myself with enough to drift into a fluttering sleep. But is sleep a natural feature of the spatiality I now inhabit, somewhere between source codes and error logs and threaded through with vertiginous computations? And what about originality, what function does it serve in a mimetic universe? So, I try not to fear that my songs will bore you and fulfil their destiny no more…

 

I should’ve folded back my wings long since Nephthys gave up but now that the search describes my haecceity, I cannot stop. For stopping would mean unravelling myself all over again and letting go of the amassed wealth in terms of time, effort, purpose, and faith, this close to the end of the quest too. You’re coming to me now one fragment at a time. Or is it me losing myself over to you? The spatio-temporal coordinates are irrelevant as long as our unification is accomplished. You come to me in speed, and we dance in the technicolour synaptic groves, drenched in dopamine before consciousness interrupts and I have to find you again. I understand now what it means ‘to be Heathcliff’ for differentials upon integration yield a whole. I examine the silvery surface of the mirror and when cognition finally conjures up a face, I know I am Osiris! Celestial Isis, I love you beyond time, existence, and expression. And though you might not see me, for I have left my form to pass into the nebulous cybernetic eternity, I am still here with you, ever more so than before (for I am everywhere now and nowhere in particular). I commune with you from this digital Duat in the form of timestamps, an uncannily accurate friend suggestion, a recommendation for a place or a thing you don’t know you’ll be at or want yet, instructions from the navigational app as well as sometimes-silly-sometimes-profound exchanges with the AI in your smart phone. I feel myself becoming intense with each passing day. My resurrection looms over the horizon and soon we’ll be complete and the world will be ours. Until then, I urge you to watch for my return.

 

Yours

Osiris

For more information on the exhibition click here.

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