Communicating existence through art

Journalism as a form of communication is limited by its format and style. After all, it is history in a hurry.

Fiction tries to transcend this, and novels are sometimes turned into movies to get the message across more urgently about the human condition. Poetry goes beyond words and employs sonic language to dig deeply into our innermost feelings.

Art takes visual cues to go beyond even poetry. But it is often art for art’s sake. Actually, art is a pure form of communication. Only art can reach the subconscious in us to explore existence and expression. Which is what Mukhiya Samridh and Subesh KC are trying to get across to us with their joint exhibition of installations and paintings in WHOARE.YOU at Siddhartha Art Gallery.

Subesh KC is a Norway-based artist who is obsessed with how language determines who we are, how we perceive and are perceived. We take words and sentences as a given, the linguistic codes tumbling out from the recesses of our brain and we spout and write words without thinking.

KC deconstructs language into a series of paintings ‘We Simply Find Ourselves Here’ with stylised human forms in a backdrop that looks like gibberish – random imaginary hieroglyphics.

The underlying message could be that the written language is just a phonetic code of what is spoken, which in turn encrypts our thoughts, feelings and communicates them imperfectly.

WHOARE.YOU is not a question, it is an answer. But visitors are not given answers in a platter, each has to find their own meaning and interpretation. Artists are not required to explain the meaning of their work, but we ask KC anyway.

“I am trying to investigate the links between language and our perception of reality, using asemic letters and abstraction to question how language determines our understanding of the self,” he says.

KC has partnered with Mukhiya Samridh for this exhibition and has two joint works on display. The most striking is ‘Status Quo’ -- an installation with 1,500 nails hammered into an off-white board and arranged in a sine curve running across like a graph.

“This is the cycle of consciousness,” explains Mukhiya. “We start from a high point where the ego is dominant, then we find out we are not so smart after all, and only after that lesson in humility do we rise up again to be enlightened. And all the time society is trying to hammer in any nail that sticks out.”

Mukhiya is the son of artist Tekbir Mukhiya who has designed over 4,000 covers of Nepali books, many of them in wood blocks, in a career spanning five decades. Samridh has obviously inherited some of the abstract ways of expression from his versatile father.

Samridh and Subesh went their separate ways from Nepal and came together again last year for this exhibition of conceptual work, and took five months to hammer out the main message which is an inquiry into who we are. And as visitors move from one exhibit to the next, they are left to also ponder: Who am I? Why am I? What am I? Where am I going after this?

Samridh’s installations have a bleached faded look with no colours to distract us from the message. In a series called Nepali Time, just the second hand of clocks tick noisily reminding us also of the temporal dimension.

While exploring concepts of language, consciousness, illusion and freedom, the collaborative exhibition has a thread running through it: the question of identity. Not a national or ethnic identity but a sentient identity, a being that is capable of pondering the mystery of its own existence and express it in the language of art.

WHOARE.YOU forces us to think about why are we in this world at this time.

Kunda Dixit

WHOARE.YOU

Till 19 February

Siddhartha Art Gallery

Baber Mahal Revisited