vinyl print, graphite on paper
Till the Sun Rises is the first of the Sequences: Interwoven Internationalisms at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD), in collaboration with n Collaboration with Oralities Research Lab, a library and event space in Jaipur dedicated to oral knowledge transmission as a medium of the future. Curated by artist, researcher and curator Vinit Agarwal and Doreen Mende.
I was asked to respond to a film by Chetna Vora’s OYOYO (1980) – a film that is is an archive of sounds, of feelings between home and being, of struggles and love. The film portrays students from Ethiopia, Chile, Guinea-Bissau and Mongolia who live in a hall of residence in Berlin-Karlshorst.
The drawing follows the movements from architecture to defining the object (the object of history, the object of the human, the person embedded within a context from a specific country) and then continues into abstraction where ideas and alignments collide, and there is an active search for a common ethics. The drawing is long, you can walk along it and something visibly changes in it as the viewer moves: objects disappear, and reappear as impressions of their former selves, their outlines vanish to reveal what lies inside.
What does it mean to see though free-standing windows? Physiologically, vision is always mediated by gravity and together they determine how we navigate the world. In some sense, we can only see and move so far as we are grounded. The suspended window cannot, as per physics, exist since any structure needs another to hold it down to the earth; structures too need grounding. But maybe the suspended viewing apparatus is useful to consider an altered vision for a brief time. So that we can learn to navigate differently, and experiment with different ways of organising ourselves and what is left of the ground that we have to build on.
Aarti Sunder 