from Calcutta to Brisbane... from home to home
It is in the smallest hand that the sky takes refuge. A man’s hand hardens against the sky. I look at my palms. All the roads my ancestors travelled are traced there. A complete map of the exodus. I would like my writing to ally my childish hand with the desert. Words of milk and words of blood. You can never be absolutely sure of your age. Time crosses time and vanishes where god is silent. We grow old through the word. We die of transition.1
In the farthest corner of the space there plays a quiet loop of video footage, a projection inverted, silently flaunting a glorious intensity of colour. The disguised video camera, veiled in a red saree, had been activated, and held like a tiny child at her hip, discreetly observing the passages through place and tracing the steps taken through the streets of Calcutta-the daily journey of an artist from home to studio. This literal 'footage' becomes a memento of the blur of time, a 'faithful' recording of the unseen and the seen (through whose eyes?, through what layers?). This is documentary evidence of the most ordinary moments. Through retracing the film, through re-pacing the steps, the video piece is a way to hold, a little longer, the exquisite scattered pleasure of being oneself in an unknown place, unworthy and foreign, skimming the surface of someone else's location, the body receiving everything and nothing. Acute remembrances of moments are forgotten again well before they are even realised. Resting lightly on the edge of another culture, the veiled, reflected, inverted, transferred experiences of travel and encounter are beautifully exposed in this work.
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