Devika
Sundar
Absent Bodies
2015 - 2019
Series: Installation/ Photography/ Print Making
“What we know we cannot accomplish in reality, we can still wish for and this wishing, wishing in the face of acknowledged impossibility becomes quite naturally ‘wistful’ in character”
Edward Casey, Remembering, A Phenomenological Study. *
Wistfulness. “Wistful” derives from a combination of two sentiments and words - “wishful” and a now archaic word “whistly” (meaning “intently”). However, while being wishful indicates hope or optimism for the future, wistfulness expresses an emotion, uneasily complex, paradoxical and bittersweet. We are rendered wistful by the very “non-retrievability of certain experiences”, “an acknowledgement of the ineluctable transience of the human experience".* Through a series of paintings, monoprints, photographs, journals, writings and installation - I explore wistfulness as a state of "linger"; a persistent remnance of an absent and misplaced 'other' that shifts ambivalently between our past, present and future.
Image, The Box of Lost Dreams, Installation 2015
[ You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; ... Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory”
- A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, Roland Barthes
"I shift back, and remember other moments - of a hug left too soon retreating quietly, in fear of the silence of a hug held too long. Or those of fingers fumbling and loosening, escaping quicker than they feel allowed to stay.
telling myself that love, where just enough, yet not enough, is where I learn to pause and place my stop signs.
As far as I try to allow myself to invest in its feeling, I find myself silently fighting a waiting, quiet uneasiness, holding out in anticipation and fear of the day its temporality leaves me.
That we love in acceptance, not just for what has been lost, but for what we know may inevitably be lost some day."
- musings, 2016 ]