Shoonya , or zero, in its literal Hindi translation, is an important word to bear in mind, when engaging with artist Sudarshan Shetty’s latest show. One first encounters the term in the title, Shoonya Ghar , which is borrowed from the opening lines of a Nirgun poem composed by the 12th century poet Gorakhnath – a predecessor of Kabir, in both professional and ideological lineage. This doha , forms the basic tenet around which the artwork evolves. Everything that follows in the show becomes a reminder and extension of this very word. Shoonya , believes Shetty, remains untranslatable in any other language as it is in the original. Both nothingness or empty/emptiness, used often to describe it, are mere synonyms, lacking in the much larger “cosmic feel” that shoonya evokes. The work then becomes an effort, a journey of exploration in trying to articulate its true meaning through a myriad possibilities.
While the poem walks one through empty streets and an empty town in a city of nothingness, the exhibition welcomes its viewer to a vacant home that one gets to, after traversing a long bare corridor. Stacked with utensils, a bed and a few other basic appliances, the tiny house in its resoluteness of being a home, only amplifies the emptiness through its silent abandonment. Responses to the work in the form of questions might already begin to form in the audience’s mind at this point. Whose house this is? Who lived here? Where did they go off to? Perhaps, even the purpose of the emptiness is partially brought into question as a larger query here.
Acquiring new layers
The structure that one walks through, has been created entirely from used wood procured from second hand markets. Though made to resemble an architectural set, its sheer size conjures up an image that’s closer to a “palatial ruin”, reflects Shetty. Housed currently at the Bhau Daji Lad (BDL) Museum in the city, “it looks like it belongs here”, feels the artist, owing to the unknown histories and stories of its previous owners carried along by the wood in its core. Built from scratch over a long, winding period of 18 months at Shetty’s studio, the set, once complete, was dismantled and rebuilt again at the shooting site - an abandoned quarry near Lonavala, which one sees in the hour-long film that follows as the second facet to this multimedia show. Each time the set travelled to a new place, from the NGMA in Delhi last year, to the Sydney Biennale and from there to the Yinchuan Biennale in China and finally back to Mumbai, it both gathered new and lost old layers of what it once was, transforming into an ever changing repository of experiences. “The object must change for it to survive”, affirms Shetty, questioning the “idea of permanence” in relation to both objects within museums and outside them, as also ideas that one associates with things. Objects, he believes, even if immobile or preserved in a glass case within closed spaces, change with our constantly changing perceptions projected onto them.
For Shetty, the structure of the doha itself makes space for this change to take place. The images and ideas that the poem’s first line throws up might be completely different in nature to its second line. He explains further, “It’s not necessarily opposite in nature but it’s diverse. And this holds somewhat of a crux to understanding how a doha works, in that sense. That it opens up enormous possibilities. What it creates is like a huge space which moves far beyond the images of the words…that it also becomes eminently interpretable…you can take away from it the way you have experienced the world…” From this, stems the artist’s belief and his more than a decade long tryst with the idea of multiplicity, of communicating a certain thought in all its perspectives, its varied forms and its incongruities. A theory of opposites that co-exist and are not mutually exclusive but rather work in their mutual inclusiveness to give birth to newer meanings and ideas comes into play. This is something that Shetty believes is key to ancient Indian aesthetic as well. As an example, he cites a line from another doha by Kabir - ‘ Lagan bin jaage naa nirmohi ’, which roughly translates to, ‘The unattached one will not awaken if you have no devotion ’, where two contradictory terms, detachment and devotion, share the same home space of one single sentence, a single thought.
Filming intangibles
The doha , when deconstructed, opens up into a series of images which are set in a certain defined space. Though when imagined, this is a tangible, physical space – be it a nagari with ten doors or a lotus pond where no bee dwells. For Shetty, this architectural characteristic innate to the doha was reason enough to create a set that best portrayed its structure. The set then also becomes the framework within which the film is born. Using a crew of professional and non-professional actors, musicians and workers who built the set, the film further augments ideas of multiplicity, of vagueness and of meaning or the lack of it. With a loose script that constantly evolved as the shoot progressed and as the set was recreated on location, the film incorporates “all the conventions of the making of a film – there’s music, there’s performance and there is the building of the set…” – constants of mainstream cinema.
But the narrative is hardly linear, leaving the audience as baffled as before. One finds herself earnestly trying to attach meaning and correlation to the visuals and the audio as means to a direct end and might be finally forced to make peace with the fact that there might be none at all. Just like in real life, the viewer’s expectation is often completely disregarded, placing her in the position of an onlooker or bystander, with little or no control, a mere witness to life’s events as they unfold in the cycle of birth, death, violence, companionship, drama, passion, youth and old age. One realises that even for there to be acceptance, there first has to be awareness.
Playing with time
Shetty also questions his own role here, as a contemporary artist and while acknowledging himself in that position automatically becomes an outsider or an onlooker to it. Just like the act of labelling or describing something makes one view it from a gaze of distance. “When you allow for things to happen…then you just become a reason for it…”, reflects Shetty on the process that he adhered to while making the film, where the action unfolded organically, fuelled by a mutual energy of its own and with minimal intervention from him as the artist/director. It again completely transformed while editing, where Shetty played with time, in where and how he placed each cut. This approach in turn is inspired by his other core inspiration - classical music, where there is always a base beat to adhere to, which then the musician stretches, contracts and repeats, opening up the audience to multiple possibilities or several facets while simultaneously challenging fixed notions one might be stuck to. The empty house, fleshed out from Shetty’s memories of his own childhood home, has become his core idea of a home and the long corridor that leads upto it, perhaps his journey, both into and away from this memory.
On the whole, the work becomes a departure from the self, a kind of transcendence within and beyond, that is made possible by way of questioning or of “mediating”, as Shetty puts it, between two or more facets. The quest becomes the process. “Can you include that vacuum, the meaninglessness of making something into the making of the artwork…can both those positions co-exist within the same space/experience?,” Shetty wonders aloud. Can the purposelessness of existence, be also included, in exploring the purpose of existence, of living for instance? Creating objects as art, is just one way of commuting to this plane of comprehension or indulging in a dialogue with these queries. The importance of learning is equalled to the importance of unlearning, of rejecting inertia or stagnation and embracing change and hence growth.
Shoonya Ghar is ongoing at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Byculla until December 26
