‘The Game’ by Ravi Kashi

The protagonists of his recent works on view at Sumukha (Bangalore; Chennai) and Pundole are the Buddha, the body and the chest of drawers – all assembled to form ‘The Game’. Each of them serves him as a screen for the self’s disquietudes: a figure of contestation between carnality and transcendence, between archived sensations and unsettling revelations.

‘The Game’ originates in the artist’s delight in arranging objects to provoke spontaneous auguries. Interestingly, he started photographing the different arrangements, which ultimately became a serious art project. He reveals, “I’ve been collecting objects that seemed interesting, but without any design. Suddenly unexpected meanings started emerging from the juxtaposition.

"This naturally led to a process of exploration and expansion of the association of meanings. It’s not to say there was no pattern to the whole thing: the arrangements were planned to some extent but as the shooting proceeded, fresh ideas emerged, new associations popped up.”

This whole process can also probably be termed ‘Photo-performance’ in the sense that it presents itself as a photo documentation of continuously changing installations that happen in the studio space. Apart from his two suites of photographs, ‘Engaging Buddha’ and ‘Meeting in Darkness’, Ravi Kashi presents a timed video sequence, ‘Chest of Secrets’ that gradually discloses the pattern of secret obsessions lying beneath the surface routines of normality.

A curatorial note by Ranjit Hoskote explains how through the objects arranged in ‘Engaging Buddha’ in variable tableaux around a Buddha head, the artist extracts and performs the tensions between time and eternity, the ladder to heaven and the feast of sensuous pleasure, the self as animal nature and the self blindfolded against the world’s blandishments.