Concept Note

The exhibition titled Failed Plot is inspired by the idea of the incomplete picture. No matter how we frame the image,  is it ever complete?

Recent terror events, believed to have a locus in West or South Asia and enacted in different parts of the world come to be known in media and academic parlance as the “failed plot”. At different times, London, Washington, New York, Hamburg, New Delhi, Lahore, the Phillipines – and so on – have become the new, explosive location for the failed plot. In every case, the system, the network has failed to connect or ignite. As investigations get underway, the truth remains elusive, and its quest is abandoned. Fragments of the plotters lives, little bits of narrative float and beam through global media networks. Yet the whole plot is never known, and the narrative remains partially uncovered. In a million unrecorded ways, these narratives are completed, abandoned, denied, until they uneasily subside in the residue of public memory.

This exhibition however is not about terror or terror mechanisms.

Rather, it urges an enquiry into a more personal sphere, of how we receive and make images and imaginary narratives. Away from the pressing pursuit of the media, or global investigation agencies there are other incomplete narratives, where the whole picture is never seen. Of other aspirations and life stories, poems, manuscripts, ideas, that may remain incomplete. Together they may be seen as a document to failure, or else like the elephant narrative, suggests that the truth is always a partial narrative.

This may be the case even when we seek to make the documentary work, one that is meant to withstand the scrutiny of time. While sorting out photographs of his dead mother, Roland Barthes says “I could not say I loved them; I was not sitting down to contemplate them, I was not engulfing myself in them. I was sorting them, but none seemed to me really “right”………” In effect, the truth or the entirely of the experience, can never be fully transmitted.

Perhaps it is appropriate to suggest that the nature of truth is always ambivalent. Working within her frame/space the artist draws on this ambivalence, of the partial narrative, allowing the viewer to complete the plot and make the ‘truth’ of her own reading.

Gayatri Sinha, May 2009