WORDS: A USER'S MANUAL

The architecture of words is mysterious; they conceal as they reveal, they fall apart and reconfigure, they constrain and they liberate. They are missing links and they are empty spaces. In all these paradoxes, they are the story.

...

Curated by Himali Singh Soin
Raqs Media Collective | Sarnath Banerjee | Zuleikha Chaudhari | Prayas Abhinav | Sachin George Sebastian | Hanif Kureshi | Vibha Galhotra

 

Exhibit 320 | F-320, Lado Sarai, New Delhi

The immediate recollection of a use of text came with my early morning tea from the newspaper I just picked from outside the door. Almost completely covered with text, it was covering a lot of stories happening all around us. The second thought was that of how the entire city is waking up with it, making the day better, worse or least affected by the same. These multiple stories kept getting stacked at the corner of a room. Those stacks represented the whole set of events that happened in the past few months. Like a diary of the nation, n bits from all over the world. Many stories disappeared half way through until someone new digs it up. Many stories were of catastrophes all around the world, n many led to the destruction as well as creation of many individuals and groups. Though our name n details are not there, somewhere or the other, they made it up as part of our lives. They kept getting stacked in layers like the building we see around us, the building we live within. These buildings just kept growing day by day like the stacks of paper in the corner of a room. N within these stories we live. We manage to figure our lives through the narrow lanes that are created from the shadows of these stories. I present you the very first thought/ a feeling that passed me while being through these multi-story bombardments of text, which was lying right next to that cup of tea.

 Multi-Story 

 2011 , (60" x 27" x 54"- approx)

Newspapers, resin, coffee table,

coffee cup & a broken saucer