A Magical Continent

A Magical Continent [1]

»But if you don’t do these sortings, these purges, and you allow the flow of paper to engulf you, considering it impossible to separate the important from the unimportant – wouldn’t that be insanity? When is that possible? It is possible when a person honestly doesn’t know which of these papers is important and which is not, why one principle of selection is better than another, and what distinguishes a pile of necessary papers from a pile of garbage.«

»The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away«Ilya Kabakov

An artistic practice and a work of art are both (separately) part of multiple political exchanges at the same time, often without the agency of the artist herself. The politics in them perhaps can never can be elaborated on separately as a singular component or »dimension« as I would imagine it to be inextricably dispersed in the various traits and assumptions that qualifies its statuses.

My projects and practice do not refer or allude to my subjective concerns and stances. I am more interested in the mechanics of a political (or any dogmatic) apparatus. Like how their operations can appear inseparable from the orders it wishes to reform as they mutate and turn into local, smaller phenomena.

Perhaps as a reflexive response, I tend to collect impressions from sites of such slow collisions. These gathered images overlap and spread, forming a phantasmagoric surface. It denies the once familiar landscapes, offering a »view from nowhere that is a view from everywhere.« [2] This becomes a ground for constant exchanges and an unstable refuge for me and my practice.

Adityan Melekalam
Adityan Melekalam
Adityan Melekalam
Adityan Melekalam
Adityan Melekalam
  1. Jump Up On André Breton’s collection: http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/olalquiaga.php [accessed August 27, 2016]
  2. Jump Up From »Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved: Nasreen Mohamedi 1937–1990« by Geeta Kapur, http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/nasreen-mohamedi/elegy-for-unclaimed-beloved [accessed August 27, 2016].