"Unfamiliar Tales is a pair of image-text diptychs titled
'How The Most Terrible Solitude Was Overcome'
and
'How the Long Wait for the Thaw was Endured'.
The work features lenticular reproduction of photographic images and text inscriptions cut into hard plastic surfaces (along with corrections in the form of 'strike-through' lines). The texts are very short stories, two new Jataka tales, of equal length.
Jataka Tales often include animals and common folk, adopt a demotic idiom and suggest that Buddhahood or enlightenment has a universal potentiality. A monkey, a bird, an artisan, a washer-woman - each of these can be a Buddha. So, we think, can a patch of sky, and a cheerful bicycle.
Unfamiliar Tales takes this universal potential for enlightenment as its fulcrum in order to narrate two modes of being that approximate a state of 'not-self'-ness - a manner of sentience that locates its origin and existence within a web of dependence and reciprocity that encompasses the ever-changing nature of the material universe. The work proposes a pair of parables about moments in the journeys of a lost patch of sky and a frozen bicycle towards Buddhahood. These moments are exemplars for what liberation can mean today."
Jataka Tales often include animals and common folk, adopt a demotic idiom and suggest that Buddhahood or enlightenment has a universal potentiality. A monkey, a bird, an artisan, a washer-woman - each of these can be a Buddha. So, we think, can a patch of sky, and a cheerful bicycle.
Unfamiliar Tales takes this universal potential for enlightenment as its fulcrum in order to narrate two modes of being that approximate a state of 'not-self'-ness - a manner of sentience that locates its origin and existence within a web of dependence and reciprocity that encompasses the ever-changing nature of the material universe. The work proposes a pair of parables about moments in the journeys of a lost patch of sky and a frozen bicycle towards Buddhahood. These moments are exemplars for what liberation can mean today."
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"How the Most Terrible Solitude was Overcome"
(inscribed on the green placard)
"Once, a small piece of sky ( a Bodhisattva unknown to itself) landed on the earth. It rested, bewildered by the hardness of the surface. Everything, everywhere, was arid. The sky-patch-Buddha-to-be felt very alone. It had lost its playmates, the clouds. Many years passed. The patch of sky, full of unselfconscious yet boundless compassion, decided to be useful to the earth. The skylet after considerable meditation on being fluid and substantial at the same time, condensed itself into a pool of clear cool water. Grasses began to grow around it in abundance. The wind played ripples and laughed skittered on its surface. It quenched the thirst of passing strangers, provided clear water to splash about in on hot days. Its lost playmates, the clouds, would stop by to reflect themselves. Sometimes it was just the blue firmament that found itself recovered in the empty blueness of the fragment of sky that had strayed so far from home. And this the humble patch of fallen sky was united again with the heavens above even as it continued to sustain the earth below. Grass, wind, clouds,earth,thirst, and the quenching of thirst, all found themselves intricately bound in a relationship of interdependence. Nothing seemed possible without the active presence of everything else. The desolation of the most terrible solitude was overecome, even as the most replete emptiness was attained. "
"Once, a small piece of sky ( a Bodhisattva unknown to itself) landed on the earth. It rested, bewildered by the hardness of the surface. Everything, everywhere, was arid. The sky-patch-Buddha-to-be felt very alone. It had lost its playmates, the clouds. Many years passed. The patch of sky, full of unselfconscious yet boundless compassion, decided to be useful to the earth. The skylet after considerable meditation on being fluid and substantial at the same time, condensed itself into a pool of clear cool water. Grasses began to grow around it in abundance. The wind played ripples and laughed skittered on its surface. It quenched the thirst of passing strangers, provided clear water to splash about in on hot days. Its lost playmates, the clouds, would stop by to reflect themselves. Sometimes it was just the blue firmament that found itself recovered in the empty blueness of the fragment of sky that had strayed so far from home. And this the humble patch of fallen sky was united again with the heavens above even as it continued to sustain the earth below. Grass, wind, clouds,earth,thirst, and the quenching of thirst, all found themselves intricately bound in a relationship of interdependence. Nothing seemed possible without the active presence of everything else. The desolation of the most terrible solitude was overecome, even as the most replete emptiness was attained. "
-Raqs Media, Unfamiliar Tales
YOU are
ReplyDeletethe most noble.