PROGRAMMES / Exhibitions

Nameless Here For Evermore

Khoj International Artists’ Association
supported by
Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan

In collaboration with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Present

Nameless Here For Evermore

Opening: 9th January, 6.00 pm – 9.30 pm

Exhibition on view: 10th January – 31st January,
11:00 am to 7:00 pm (Sundays closed)
at Khoj Studios, S-17, Khirkee Extension, New Delhi-17

Nameless Here For Evermore, brings together artistic practices that ask us to reflect on our implication in collective suffering, whether in the violence of Kashmir over the last decade, the Punjab and Delhi riots of 1984, the occupation of Afghanistan, the ‘greenhunt’ in the forests of Bastar, the competition and alienation of capitalist Taipei, or the anti-communist purge of1960s Indonesia. Our inability to adequately address and transform the wounds of collective trauma has often resulted in silence or stigma and the erection of all kinds of psychic and social barriers. Many such traumas have proven resistant to treatment in the traditional psychoanalytic clinic, while the social core of these traumas has been left more or less untouched by the various psy-professions.

At the same time, the assembled works also suggest that artistic practice, free from the ‘logic’ of the psychoanalytic clinic, has the potential to resonate with, diagnose and change experiences of trauma, often with an unexpectedly new ‘language.’ Art can resist, it can remediate, it can heal. Each work exemplifies how artists, as Deleuze (1997) argued, can frequently go further than clinicians, because ‘the work of art gives them new means.’

Artists

Desire Machine Collective
Gauri Gill
Joshua Oppenheimer
Virlani Rupini & Leon Tan
Marine Hugonnier
Navjot Altaf
Sean Snyder
Sonia Jabbar
Wael Shawky

Curators
Khoj International Artists’ Association
Leon Tan

“This thought keeps consoling me:
though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed
in rooms where lovers are destined to meet,
they cannot snuff out the moon, so today,
nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed,
no poison of torture make me bitter, if just one evening in prison
can be so strangely sweet,
if just one moment anywhere on this earth.”

—A Prison Evening, Faiz Ahmed Faiz

TAGS Capitalist Culture, Exhibition, Film, Globalisation, Mass Consumer Culture, Medicine, Photography, Psychoanalysts, Psychology, Schizoanalysis, Trauma, Video Art