we are all islands
A solo exhibition by Sharmistha Ray
As we hurtle towards digital realities in the age of technology, the internet and social media, do we risk the extinction of our sentient consciousness, mediated by touch, human presence and an appreciation of beauty? Have we all become willful islands, fragments of humanity adrift in the ocean of virtual connections in a globalized world?
Nine Fish Art Gallery presents we are all islands, the sixth solo exhibition by Sharmistha Ray. Ray is a visual artist, TED Fellow and creator of Bellevue Salons, a mobile conversational platform that augments participatory modes of engagement across creative disciplines.
Comprising painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and installations, we are all islands marks a new conceptual direction for the artist, unveiling a bold merger of concepts and practices she has been experimenting with over the last few years. Through multisensory environments, Ray adapts the grammar of identity politics to express the germ of her own history, the voyage of discovery across geographies fueled in part by departures and arrivals, exile and refuge, in search of lost time, unrequited loves and the possibility of transcendence in order to examine the nature of contemporary existence.
Exposure to war, migration and coming out in her formative years provides the basis of Ray's preoccupation with identity politics, cultural hegemonies and the nature of power. Born in Kolkata, Ray spent her early years in Kuwait before The Gulf War forced her family into exile between India and Switzerland in the early nineties. They eventually resettled in Kuwait after the war was over, emigrating to America a few years later. In 2006, Ray reverse migrated to India, spending a short period in her native Kolkata, before settling in Mumbai where she continues to live and work. The intersections of race, color, religion, history, nationality, diaspora, sexuality and gender commingle at the crossroads, at odds with the promise of the flatlands of globalization.
Drawing on postcolonial theory and queer politics, the artist constructs an autobiography of lived experience, proposing multiple perspectives for the construction of identity. Positing herself as the subaltern subject/object, she devises a map of her (dis)orientations, continually shifting the line of her gaze, distancing herself from the objects of her desire to navigate the field of mnemonic disjunctures. Mapping orientation is a way to make sense of time and (in)visibility, evinced by the nuanced overlaying of cultural references in her work. Personal memory becomes a weapon, a form of resistance against cultural erasures enforced by the passage of time and narratives in a state of flux.
In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Sara Ahmed refers to the spatial arrangement of social relations and how 'queerness' disrupts and disorders these relations. Deriving 'orientation' from 'sexual orientation' and 'orient' from 'oriental,' she examines what it means for queer bodies to be situated in space and time. If patriarchy and its structures commandeer a politics of orientation and towing a straight line, then the politics of disorientation that continually interrupts the status quo is an effective strategy for being in the world, she posits.
In the diptych photograph the brea(d)th of life is a measure of time (2016), Ray confronts an inner reality oriented towards a core experience of beauty and the sublime, reconditioning these values for the subaltern condition. Juxtaposing the straight line of a distant horizon with the nearness of the curved edge of the swimming pool, she subtly explores the dichotomy of difference.
Building further on these ideas, the viewer is invited to navigate an archipelago of forms, a network of brilliantly hued rock sculptures Cosmic Earth (2016) in the first of three interconnected spaces in the gallery. At the remotest corner of this space stands a virgin well-like structure, an installation titled Sanctum II (2016) with 108 original drawings digitally projected into it and playing on a loop. The artist thus engages in a rigorous activity of unforgetting through the repetitive delineation of the fugitive contours of the subject/object of her desire. Alternating notions of presence, touch, sentience and interiority throughout the exhibition, Ray compels us to rethink the scope of humanity by devising our own maps of subjective disorientations.