MEMORY TRACE / DAPAAN* (it is said…)

Jul 20, 2023 - Aug 20, 2023

“At first glance, my works breathe stillness. But as the eye trains itself on the picture plane these flat surfaces become activated linear whispers that assume kinetic energies and suggest poetic missives of human experience. My training as an engineer exposed technology to me in a way that made me engage with an abstract world, wherein circuit boards translated into Mondrian’s paintings, and jumbled wires became reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock painted surface. I play with deconstructing structures, sculptural forms, mechanisms around me and then reconstruct them in my head as new forms, keeping balance and rhythm as crucial elements within this exercise. I ideate the concept in a three dimensional process of thought. This then over time undergoes a series of metamorphic transformations to articulate itself as I desire, onto a two dimensional surface.”

– Ankush Safaya

CURATORIAL NOTE

MEMORY TRACE / DAPAAN* (…it is said)

Looking from the bay windows of my studio which is currently on the ninth floor in Baroda, it seems like the landscape changes every moment I am looking at it. Something very similar to listening to a piece of music or recalling a memory. In this process of looking I establish connections through the observation of the subtle and the nuanced, confronting the unexpected – a space where the line between the real and the imagined becomes often blurred. Things act as triggers for me – ideas that come from my reading and the music I listen to that create spaces of remembrance and memories revisited. It is from here that I gather a data-pool of connectives through which I re-establish and re-create for myself. Perhaps it’s a process of looking at myself – both from a perspective of deconstructing a past that holds the imprint of my belonging – as well as imagining via a process of re-assimilation, a comprehension of life as I am living it.

At first glance, my works breathe stillness. But as the eye trains itself on the picture plane these flat surfaces become activated linear whispers that assume kinetic energies and suggest poetic missives of human experience. My training as an engineer exposed technology to me in a way that made me engage with an abstract world, wherein circuit boards translated into Mondrian’s paintings, and jumbled wires became reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock painted surface. I play with deconstructing structures, sculptural forms, mechanisms around me and then reconstruct them in my head as new forms, keeping balance and rhythm as crucial elements within this exercise. I ideate the concept in a three dimensional process of thought. This then over time undergoes a series of metamorphic transformations to articulate itself as I desire, onto a two dimensional surface. I can best describe (because I find it difficult to put this into words) that there is an osmosis of learning that I arrive at through my work. It leads me to find methodologies of structuring language and choosing material.

The optics of illusion that makes two dimensional lines appear to have movement or suggest a three dimensional space – where the conjuring of a visual tactility seduces the eye. My work is about the conflict, as it is about the calm. I identify with a politics that regards human life and the dignity of its preservation as important. Many of the works in this exhibition come from texts that I extract from my readings – books that are mostly political and historical – and works of fiction from geographical territories which have narratives of the histories of conflict and turmoil. These texts create a journey back and forth in time, sometimes a sense of loss and sometimes a sense of connection. he texts I select from larger passages of writing undergo a series of transformations using Morse code as a method to re-write them. I then inscribe these texts through varied ways. Sometimes articulated via the carbon of graphite pencils making nuanced lines on the paper surface or mechanism of burning the paper using laser – which is fed by instructions via these codes- that then creates burnt marks on paper, or perforations on these layered sheets of gateway paper which become a metaphor to skin; or the rhythm of layered translucent papers that become a palimpsest that suggests the altered. Multiple layers of these codes then transform to become multiple layers of memory on each surface – like a landscape of floating rhythms.

— Ankush Safaya, 2023

(*Dapaan is a colloquial Kashmiri word, a vernacular idiom, used frequently in everyday life; often used to begin any story that is fact or fiction.)