Lost Text

Temporality of memory is uncertain. Memory plays truant. One pens down one’s diary notes for reference, record, archive or as an aid to the events and happenings gone by. Several segments of my Bastar diaries jotted over the years, when transcribed digitally, were corrupted, converting the text into an arbitrary mix of numerals, alphabets, symbols, used and underused punctuation marks and diacritics (acute accent) that are used with alphabets of many modern written languages based in Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts - making it cryptic,

While going over these pages, I found that even though the text structure is destroyed and it has lost its chronology, sequence and clarity as the surrounding text has disappeared, interestingly enough, its disorganized fragmented patterns of words (further broken by the computer’s selective memory, vocabulary and punctuation markings) brings forth narratives out of its meant context or acts as clues to excavate the hidden meanings and creates new meanings that may or may not have been intended in the first place. The highlighted word on each page is the word I spotted first. Spotting more words could activate the viewer’s participation in creating a sense of being involved to the creative process, building ideas and meanings through their own lens of experience.

Through this text based work I play with the play of technology and play of memory to create new propositions. I have always been intrigued by the visual aesthetics in ancient scriptures on stones and though most of us cannot decipher them, they have been recorded on stones at some point of time in different places in history. The photographs are taken during my travels in and outside India over the years.

The viewer is invited to write down their thoughts, arising out of any reading of the ancient scriptures or diary notes, any word that interests/inspires them to think differently and brings forth a different line of thought or an idea, which can be penned down in a diary provided for viewer’s participation.