Proposal for India in Venice 2005

Tentative title: Liminal Passage

A video will be made of a series of events/ conversations in a landscape of immense proportions. this video will be projected on four 190 x 250cm, (75 x 98 inches) acrylic paintings.

The video will be based on a script written by me: a magico realist drama of private lives and historical engagement with a smudging of boundaries which brings reality into fantasy and fantasy into our reality. The sound (Madan Gopal Singh): a composition of everyday noise blended with primarily Indian music and a range of other musical idioms.

Stylistically, the landscape shifts, heaves and transforms in relation to the events staged in the landscape. The four 9 feet x 6 feet paintings will in parts be painted in great detail with an extensive range of colours. Other areas will be monochromatic. Some projected images will be gelled with the painted images rendering them largely immobile. The occasional animation in these images will amplify their stillness. (In cinematic terms the immobility will exist within the actual course of time: it will psychologically stretch time, enhancing it), other video images will run and move freely between the four paintings. The static video images will on occasion move away from their painted selves leaving behind a colourful or monochromatic ghost: an ‘after-image’. The characters visit other paintings and return to inhabit their ‘painted shells’ revitalising them with their ‘breath’.

The script includes an episode with the ritual of a Sikh tying his turban: He first dies his turban a certain colour ( dipping it in a village pond turning the entire pond into an immense vat of iridescent colour). The turban is then dried by two people holding it at either ends and running into the wind creating a bulbous sail. There is then the specialised rolling of the cloth and finally the slow ‘tying’ on the head.

The village pond transforms magically into another colour as the long piece of cloth (the untied turban) is pulled out,the Sikh finds himself standing on the shore of a differently dyed pool in a foreign land (America) with his turban now dyed in many colours. He carries in his suitcase the turbans rolled into colourful bundles like so many flowers which he offers to strangers.

Occasionally the projection will , in certain areas, fade out revealing the painting underneath and then slowly flicker back to life, intensifying and reanimating the painted surface. ( This is painting living within time and time living within the painting). The painted image will be a play between stylisation and verisimilitude. Charred or slimy, ephemerally tinted or layered with material substances (iron filings etc.),surface articulation will suggest space, weight and formal authority: a presence as a ‘thing’, autonomous, with its own laws, unpredictable in its ‘becoming’.

The ‘thingness’ and palpable presence of the painted images fused with the ‘aura’ of images made of light will create an aesthetic texture intimating a new eloquence.

I do not see this work as a hybrid or a composite, but a fecund image-structure breathing to the rhythm and beat of one heart. There is an inner connection, logic between the video-movement and the painted/sculpted surface. The video image is tied to the concrete and the material (literally). I see the work possessing a kind of wholeness, observing one aspect of our discovery of surrounding verities. It is ‘time’ pulsating in the flesh of the painting. A moment is reproduced in its fluid mutability. In the time’s rhythms, the image falls into infinity, exceeds its own limits.

Exhibition space: I see this work adorned in a sheen of light, in a cave-temple like semidarkness, glimmering in a self-willed concreteness.

Note: The attached images were part of the original proposal and are not from ‘Crossings’