All that you leave behind, resonates with the idea of residue as a mark of creative endeavour. The traces of human passage may survive as sentinels of historic sites, grand memorials or commee, the clash of communities, mass migration and the loss of civilisations.morate acts of glory. With little intent, they also reveal the depredations of nature.
At the same time, there is little evidence of residue which marks change not always visible. What we leave or abandon, forget or forsake can mark many acts of erasure. In music, writing or painting, the genesis of a work and the state of an artist in its making is not always evident in the final outcome.
While creativity itself has been described by Einstein as the ‘residue of wasted time’, art generates its own celebration of residue and recall. Photographs arrest the moment even as it passes into time; in sculpture the found object, recontextualized, gains a new valence. The archive vivifies the past with its insertion into the present. In painting the moment and its trace, and selective erasure all constitute what the artist seeks to preserve. Deleuze in Anti -Oedipus suggests that the past can flow into the present, allowing for the making of new identities. “It is best to select our thoughts so that everything is left behind.”
In this exhibition the artists pose a series of questions about passage and temporalities. Thus, a shadow may appear more memorable than its form. The contour of bodies as they slip into sleep or oblivion and the shadowy play of planets and their spheres of mysterious influence, all appear for contemplation. The fleeting impression of waves on the sand, the mask’s game of viewing and concealment, and the images of states of dream and hallucination are all rendered as momentary. The artist stills time, seizes the moment and offers it for contemplation.
It is in ‘leaving behind’ residue, of a past that takes form in the present and enriches the future, that the artist endures, and seeks creative definition. Like a jumble of processes, filtered selections, fragments and echoes, ultimately residue constitutes who we are.
— Gayatri Sinha