Touch 1, 2, 3 RememberIng Altaf

The work is about the need and the significance of touch as a kind of communication with and through the body -The intimacy of sensation / feeling.

The work is based on experiences recollected from memory. For me “it is an ensemble of elements through a symbolic transformation that serves as an imaginary discourse”.

The narrative here is not linear. But a sense of the erotic and fantasy may tell a story. I have looked at the subject from a personal as well as in a larger socio - cultural perspective. References from Levi Strauss’s Structural Anthropology, for example helped understand the emergence of the rule of exogamy enforced by incest restriction and how the passage from a state of nature to a state of culture occurred.

Concept is metaphorically expressed through contemporary dance and visuals - recreated from the shot footage and stills of performance and installation art by various artists I respond to. (Such as Joseph Beuys Morph and Horns 1960, Shigeko Kubota’s- Vagina Painting Moon 1991, Nalini Malani’s Remembering Toba Tek Singh 2000 etc) And there are references from films. (Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona’,’Seventh Seal’ and ‘Autum Sonata’, Meera Nair’s, ‘Kama Sutra’, Kundan Shah ‘s ‘Jane Bhi Do Yaro’, Hrishikesh Mukherjee ‘s ‘Chupke Chupke’, Robert Benton’s ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’, and Ben Younger’s ‘Prime’ etc).

By inviting / involving the performers, non-performers (Mahabano, Utkarsh Mazumdar, Anusha Lall, Sheeba Chadda, Nayla Sheikh, Raza Hussain Mehta Georgina Maddox, Kritika, Kanika Gulzar, Sanchita, Augustine, Govind Sirsat, Ritesh in the process of creating /enacting imagery according to their perceptions, I sense that they entered into the work and became an extension of the artist’s visualization at one level and have added their own perceptions at another.