Simulacrum

28 July - 8 August 2022
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Keeping Things Whole, Mark Strand

In the order of the original and copy, the factual and fictive, the notion of simulacra
appears as a troubling force. Replacing the foundations of truth and origin, the simulacra forces us to see outside of what is visible or what is stated. In the absence of
representational certainty, we inhabit a world of simulacra—an order where the binaried
relationship between presence and absence is destabilised, and what is present becomes a memorial for that which is lost. Exploring the philosophy of simulacrum in the writings of Baudrillard and Deleuze, the exhibition disturbs meanings of the truth and reality through the prism of absence—disappearances, departures, vanishings and erasures. These absences, manifest as spectres, silences and hauntings, reveal a fissure at the very core of truth or its indexical reproduction.

Moving through disquietude and desolation of rooms and landscapes, into the still
corners of the body and mirrored selves, the residues of touch and contact borne by
objects, Simulacrum probes deeper into the fulcrum of reality, or the attempt to keep
things whole. It presents works by artists who seek the instance, outside of linear time,
where the authority of the ‘real’ begins to dissolve in the ether of perception, and a veil is lifted within.

text@Arushi Vats