Touch the Sky

Do objects ever dream of touching the sky? Do objects — made of steel and mortar, made of wood and stone, made of alchemy ancient — ever desire to grow, to repair, to reproduce? The exhibition Touch the Sky, curated by Shreya Pate, reimagines not only what it means to be an object but also the cumulative affect it produces on the space it inhabits. In this exhibition the focus lies in a particular site of habitation, an urbanscape. The city however is given to viewers not as a composite whole, but rather in fragments, in figments, in fractals. 

Cities, it is trite to say, are greater than the sum total of their people, objects and environments. It is equally well accepted that the boundaries of a city — a site of dense habitation marked by localized signs of modernity — is undoing its own temporality, always expanding and contracting. In the works on display, you see exactly this. A house emerges, concrete built modestly rising from its surrounding foliage, in a state not yet abandoned, nor in full flourish. Juxtapose this to the photographed tree, disembodied from its environs but still standing, neither abandoned nor in flourish. These images remind us of the archival capacity of objects, even when they have shape-shifted — once a part of an edifice elsehwere, now a reconstruction of wood, plaster and brass, carrying within it only an indication of a time when it was something bigger, perhaps even sacred. But objects saturate our other senses too. Agarbattis release fine lines of smoke, creating not just an olfactory experience but exhibit in that motion a desire to grow out, escape the environment, touch the sky. Or the many, many, utopias that objects and environments are capable of — seen here in more-than-real frames, in colours and palettes that are neither 'natural', nor cultivated. 

Our growing preoccupation with enhanced artificial intelligence settles, often, on a point of disquiet: an interspecies conflict where one may outdo the other. But as Touch the Sky may urge us to consider, there is another way of thinking about what we see, what we experience, and that is that sentience is not only distributed across life forms and inanimate artefacts but that which we call sentience, is in fact a multispecies assemblage. A coming together of many thingummies to produce a constant bending of historical time. Where technologies, objects and knowledge have always been alive. Much like a book placed on shelves of Burma teak that rises, ladder-like, where knowledge / intelligence is not contained on the shelves, in the book, but diffused all over. 

— Shatam Ray