‘In You is the Illusion of Each Day’ at Latitude 28

A group show, entitled ‘In You is the Illusion of Each Day’ curated by Maya Kovskaya, takes place at New Delhi-based Latitude 28. Among the artists whose work form part of the show are Dilip Chobisa, Neha Choksi, Han Bing, Pooja Iranna, Ranbir Kaleka, Niyeti Chadha Kannal, Sonia Khurana, Malekeh Nayiny, Prajakta Potnis, Raqs Media Collective, Kartik Sood and Michael Zheng.

Far from being escapist denials of the world and life, illusions, understood in the spirit expressed in Pablo Neruda’s poetry, breathe life into everything around us, and function as the connective tissue joining us with our external world.

…In you is the illusion of each day. You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers. You undermine the horizon with your absence. Eternally in flight like the wave. …You gather things to you like an old road. You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices. I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated that had been sleeping in your soul.
- Pablo Neruda, excerpt from 'Your Breast is Enough'

The world is as much inside us as it is outside. 'In You is the Illusion of Each Day' draws its title and thematics from a poem by Pablo Neruda, who understood our deep human need to feel intimately and inextricably connected to the world outside of each of us.

At the nexus of the binaries of the material and the ideational; the organic and humanly constructed; appearance and so-called “reality;” lies a powerful force that weaves these antinomies together, binding them into meaningful, coherent wholes, and making them as much a part of us as we are a part of the world in which they are anchored.

Erasing the clear dividing line between these binaries, the power of illusion reveals itself to be the very stuff of life that animates the inanimate, giving meaning to mere material, and making the dumb Things of this world into something far more than simple Objects. Through the power of illusion, which resides in each of our imaginations, the world of mute, lifeless Things becomes a space of Life, becomes our own, takes root inside of us and thus becomes a constitutive part of us.

Illusion, understood this way, is no longer reducible to a signifier of falsity, but rather becomes a site where the “real” is fabricated by each of us, individually and jointly. Whatever happens “out there” only becomes “real” to each of us when it exists inside us as well. Thus, illusion, and its power to enable us to connect the inside and the outside, is one of the great powers innate to human beings.

Yet with great power, comes great risks, and sometimes our illusions become delusions, or we imagine ourselves in ways that are out of sync with the rest of the world, causing rupture and, ironically, sometimes disillusionment and disconnection. How to fold the world into ourselves and ourselves into the world is one of the integral challenges of the human condition.

(Information courtesy: Latitude 28)