The hole and whole-making

Introduction

This is the second note in the series on sharing new experiences that might enable seeing the the world with new eyes. Here I explore the experience of feeling dead, listening to the screaming hole within and making attempts to learn to speak with the help of the collaborative work of artists and gallery owners. Your comments and reflections are most appreciated. Thank you.

In the first one in this series we explored the struggle with rootlessness and the chance encounter with duende through placing oneself in the midst of work by artists, craftsman, designers and curators.

Dead Man Walking

May 2nd, 2023 - Walking around the streets of different parts of Mumbai, especially the Southern part, was a different experience. The juxtaposition of old and new, common and elite, low class and high class, and destruction and creation is striking - it's like multiple decades, classes and ages all in one place. They are jostling for their life and yet find a way to be together, and flow. One can feel time and its movement across 200-300 years within a few minutes of walking the streets. This was quite unlike the usual experience with the northern parts the city. Despite the tensions of these energies and their expressions, there was a feeling of ease, aliveness, and energy - feeling like a hand had reached inside of me and was grabbing the knottedness. I was tired, felt empty and meaningless, yet did not wish to stop walking. A zombie, or dead man walking would be an accurate description of my state. The book was a work of non-fiction by Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun, in her role as a spiritual adviser to two convicted murderers on death row. In it she examined moral issues related to the men's acknowledgement of their crimes and to the state's use of the death penalty. And perhaps, it is in hindsight that I can see I have been struggling to come to terms with the wrongs I have done, the years I have spent imprisoned, and the death penalty I have been facing. A death of my-self.

Its raining memories

Memories of growing up with my family, and especially with my father, had been awakened much more sharply. I say awake because these were experiences that had been quietly dwelling in me all along, but had not been accessible to me, for reasons that are unknown. It's only when I placed myself in some of these physical locations did they begin to rise up to my conscious awareness and they came charged with emotions. First, a trickle…and then a downpour. As if I had been in the experiences, but not present at all.

Man on the run

The experiences felt like quiet and invisible tenants in my psyche. I seem to have just overlooked, forgotten and ignored them. What had I repressed? What thoughts and feelings related to internal conflicts and outer stressors did I find unacceptable and anxiety-arousing? I couldn't deny the fact that, for a good three decades, I had been busy running away - running after the newer, cooler, and neater - desperately building higher floors on some sort of foundation. Some I was made to do as an adolescent, and then some I just continued to do as every one way. And attempts to not follow the crowd were also a sort of following someone or something counter to the mainstream.

A ‘wall’ is a powerful metaphor, a political tool, both at a micro and macro level. It defines the geographies of inclusion and exclusion. History is full of such examples — the story of the Berlin wall, our own partition and the most recent, Trump’s wall. It’s a physical as well as psychological division between people and communities, enhancing the ‘us versus them’ biases.”

Sameer Kulavoor

Edifice Complex

I found myself at Tarq Gallery, founded by Hena Kapadia in 2014 on the values of creating a meaningful conversation around art and its myriad connotations and contexts. Sameer Kulavoor's art show - "Edifice Complex" with a body of work across six series was on display. In it he reflected on the idea of condensed time, with structures being in a constant state of flux. The title came from a phrase used by a Filipino activist who talked about how sometimes people or governments become obsessed with building big, impressive structures to show off their power, even when there are more important things to do. My father was a builder and I grew up in and with buildings pretty much my whole life, until about 6 years ago. In a way my whole experience growing up in and with the family was penetrated by land, buildings, sites, projects and the like.

Structures that mutate

Kulavoor's art explored the Edifice complex, especially in India, where new buildings have been popping up in cities and towns. While he didn't focus on a specific city, his work explored how cities develop and change without a rigorous and strict plan - to him design and architecture are born out of responsiveness and resourcefulness. And not from an extensive detailed pre-planning. Here, he found that sophisticated design principles are thrown to the wind and structures are mutating beings, growing and adapting to the needs and aspirations of the lives lived within.

A hole that swallows

It is these two powerful ideas - one, the way design and architecture are born out resourcefulness and responsiveness, and two, structures as mutating beings, that simply arrested me. I found myself confronted with the question -

1. where am I on this dynamic between resourcefulness and responsiveness in designing and architecting?
2. how am I mutating the structures of my life and growing and adapting to the needs and aspirations of the life lived within?

The answer rushed out even before I could ask the question - I had become polarized towards responsiveness and had much trouble with feeling resourcefulness. Always at war with the life that lived within, I couldn't help but 'respond.' All the while feeling short on resources as I fought the gaping hole in my eyes, my throat, my stomach, in my heart... in my life-at-large. A hole that screamed the way a baby does with a frightening thirst and insatiable hunger - constantly threatening to swallow one's sanity. I didn't want to hear it!!!

Oedipus and authority

Perhaps the Edifice complex and its sounding close to the Oedipus complex might reveal something - according to the tale, Oedipus unknowingly kills his father in a fit of anger. Metaphorically, it has come to represent a child’s struggle against parental authority. Mark Stein explains, in trying to deal with parental authority which is part and parcel of what most young children go through, we carry with us baggage about authority figures into adulthood, and eventually the workplace. In contemporary psychoanalytic theory, James M. Herzog's Father Hunger: Explorations with Adults and Children spoke of the unconscious longing experienced by many males and females for an involved father. Michael J. Diamond's My Father Before Me examines the importance of fatherly provisions for both sons and daughters during their respective developmental stages. Jungians have emphasized the power of parent hunger, forcing one repeatedly to seek out unactualized parts of the father archetype in the outside world.

Power, discipline and relationships

Jung believed that the father archetype was present in all of us, regardless of our relationship with our biological father. This archetype was a fundamental part of the collective unconscious and was shaped by cultural and societal influences. The father archetype played a key role in the development of an individual's personality, particularly during childhood. The father figure provided a model for behaviour and influenced the way that individuals perceived authority and power. Individuals who had negative experiences with their biological fathers would struggle to integrate the father archetype into their personalities, which could lead to difficulties in relationships and other areas of life.

Jung also believed that the father archetype played a significant role in the process of individuation, as individuals must come to terms with their relationship with the father figure in order to achieve psychological wholeness. This process involved acknowledging the positive and negative aspects of the father archetype and integrating them into one's personality. In psychotherapy, the father archetype could be an important focus of exploration and healing, particularly for individuals who struggle with issues related to authority, power, or discipline. By exploring the father archetype, individuals can gain insight into the unconscious patterns of behaviour and emotions that may be influencing their current relationships and behaviours.

Listening to the screams

I was in the midst of therapy with Kulavoor's work. At home, at work, and in life I had left the old because I knew that the hole got bigger and denser and screaming louder and more unbearable. Yet, I was struggling to make the shift into new disciplines, relationships, and hold my ground in the midst of polarization between being stable and dependable and flexible and interdependent. And I brought these struggles to my work with individuals and organizations. My clients were struggling with being either too people-oriented, or too tech-oriented, either too individual-oriented or too system-oriented. I was working really hard and never feeling enough - just the way I did with and around my father. The hole was his silence. And with his passing away, the silence had become louder!

Learning to speak

Bringing this note together and working to a closure, I began to see a bit better that perhaps the struggle was with the father archetype. All the fathers - my own and the ones before me were the quiet tenant, their presence in my life was the water, their silent authority, huge responsibility, caring relationships and strict disciplines continued to live in this city. I was guilty of forgetting my responsibility. The work of Gouranga P. Chattopadhyay and Ashok Malhotra who questioned and discussed ideas about hierarchy and delegation of authority is a warning and a calling…for me and I hope you too.

"...abdication of personal authority leads to (a) for individuals to keep in cold storage their potential capacity to give positive leadership and influence the dynamics of groups positively instead of remaining passive followers of whoever wields power and authority. (b)Their own personality also remains under-developed and stunted to the extent that they keep abdicating their personal authority. In using the word “groups” in the present context, I include from small groups like one’s family or one’s neighbourhood, groups of friends to teams that play football and other sports, one’s small working group to the entire enterprise, to one’s place of location like a village or a town or a metropolis, through one’s country and even large portions of the world’s population. (c) Through abdication of personal authority one also passively allows values that one considers as anti-people, or even anti-life like hunting as a sport, to flourish unhindered. Other examples would be allowing motivated chaos to dominate over task related authority, like political interventions through use of power to destroy the effectiveness of societal infrastructure that have been put in place to create the atmosphere for people to engage with tasks without anxiety that contribute to the totality rather than assist letting self centered people to gain more and more power."

The artist

Sameer Kulavoor (b.1983) is a visual artist living and working in Mumbai, India. Having closely witnessed the rapid transformation of urban surroundings and culture in India in the 90s (results of economic liberalisation and the internet boom), Kulavoor’s innate approach is to constantly note and understand the impact that time, culture, politics and socio-economic conditions have on our visible and invisible surroundings. His works often address how and why cities look and work the way they do by filtering, dissecting, defamiliarizing and documenting commonly seen subjects and events – often oscillating between instinctive and conceptual methods of making. Through the early 2000s, Kulavoor became widely known for his design and illustration work and set up one of the earliest specialised studios of its kind in India – Bombay Duck Designs. Over the next decade, Kulavoor moved on to focus on his solo art practice that has taken the form of drawings, paintings, videos, sculptures, murals, books, zines and art-prints.

The gallery

The TARQ was founded in 2014 by Hena Kapadia with a vision of being something of a laboratory - an incubator for young contemporary artists which would work towards pushing the boundaries of how contemporary art in India is exhibited and perceived. TARQ's youthful and experimental ethos encourages collectors, novice and seasoned alike, to approach art collecting through a perspective that marries thoughtfulness with an inquisitive eye for aesthetics and artistic processes.