As the course passed me by, I realised the process we were working under. We would first be lured into a sense of comfort, into a feeling of familiarity and knowing what we're doing, until someone or something new would emerge to make us doubt what we thought we previously knew.
For me, this happened quite distinctively twice.
First was the talk with the facilitator, Deepak. We had just begun work on the exhibition, full to the brim with ideas on LGBT, when Deepak emerged quite randomly and began questioning us on our rights.
He asked us what we thought our rights were, and if we had any instances at all of these rights being actually violated. He made me realise what I already knew, but had never pondered before - that we were quite clueless as a sect of society. We were privileged and sheltered, and we had the kind of objectivity that came with ignorance. Although we claimed to feel strongly about so many social issues, being essentially people that have not struggled even an iota of what we might have, we can never truly relate.
Deepak made us relate at least one instance of where we felt wronged, or where we felt we deserved justice but did not get it. This made me identify the one real case where my rights had been violated at all - the only emotional connect in an otherwise entirely hypothetical premise. Even if these issues were not the same at all, it was important to touch base with that personal motivation that might drive us all. It was a conversation that was quite insightful and challenging, and it definitely left me a little uncertain of where we were going. I thoroughly enjoyed the feeling.
It was after this that I decided to question the issue at the most basic level: as I knew exactly how unaware I was about the specifics of what our society was going through and why, I came down to the one thing I did know for sure. The one thing that I could relate to myself and the rest of the world: the difference between individual perception and prevailing reality. I would soon make this premise even more basic, and narrow it down to sight, but that happened mostly after the second mind-altering conversation, which was by Narendra himself.
It was after a certain talk in class about postmodernism and postructuralism, about how these concepts are not just philosophical, but are just the state of society in its day to day functioning, that I was truly inspired on what my final piece would be. I became very taken with the concept of postmodernism - something that I had always loved, but had never explored to this extent before - and I could see how to narrow down my ideas to the most basic possible form.
This corresponded exactly with what I was going through with my personal work. As I have usually written, and am a person that used to write almost every day, I am at a phase where writing feels overdone. It sometimes feels too easy to find the right words, to describe things and feelings, because I've already described them so many times before. It feels like a system, and the discovery of the process felt absent at the moment, which was something that was really disheartening for me. This made me realise that I could go at words from a different angle entirely: I was already looking at text installations, but this made me look at conceptual writing in a huge way. I realised that something wondrous lay in using words just as words, to using as few words as possible, to really going in depth into the form and meaning of words regardless of the author. I was enthralled by the idea of what a word could communicate just by itself regardless of who was saying it. I came up with the idea of combining conceptual writing to an extent with text installation.
For me, this happened quite distinctively twice.
First was the talk with the facilitator, Deepak. We had just begun work on the exhibition, full to the brim with ideas on LGBT, when Deepak emerged quite randomly and began questioning us on our rights.
He asked us what we thought our rights were, and if we had any instances at all of these rights being actually violated. He made me realise what I already knew, but had never pondered before - that we were quite clueless as a sect of society. We were privileged and sheltered, and we had the kind of objectivity that came with ignorance. Although we claimed to feel strongly about so many social issues, being essentially people that have not struggled even an iota of what we might have, we can never truly relate.
Deepak made us relate at least one instance of where we felt wronged, or where we felt we deserved justice but did not get it. This made me identify the one real case where my rights had been violated at all - the only emotional connect in an otherwise entirely hypothetical premise. Even if these issues were not the same at all, it was important to touch base with that personal motivation that might drive us all. It was a conversation that was quite insightful and challenging, and it definitely left me a little uncertain of where we were going. I thoroughly enjoyed the feeling.
It was after this that I decided to question the issue at the most basic level: as I knew exactly how unaware I was about the specifics of what our society was going through and why, I came down to the one thing I did know for sure. The one thing that I could relate to myself and the rest of the world: the difference between individual perception and prevailing reality. I would soon make this premise even more basic, and narrow it down to sight, but that happened mostly after the second mind-altering conversation, which was by Narendra himself.
It was after a certain talk in class about postmodernism and postructuralism, about how these concepts are not just philosophical, but are just the state of society in its day to day functioning, that I was truly inspired on what my final piece would be. I became very taken with the concept of postmodernism - something that I had always loved, but had never explored to this extent before - and I could see how to narrow down my ideas to the most basic possible form.
This corresponded exactly with what I was going through with my personal work. As I have usually written, and am a person that used to write almost every day, I am at a phase where writing feels overdone. It sometimes feels too easy to find the right words, to describe things and feelings, because I've already described them so many times before. It feels like a system, and the discovery of the process felt absent at the moment, which was something that was really disheartening for me. This made me realise that I could go at words from a different angle entirely: I was already looking at text installations, but this made me look at conceptual writing in a huge way. I realised that something wondrous lay in using words just as words, to using as few words as possible, to really going in depth into the form and meaning of words regardless of the author. I was enthralled by the idea of what a word could communicate just by itself regardless of who was saying it. I came up with the idea of combining conceptual writing to an extent with text installation.
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