Of pain and loss
KOCHI: The scattered remains of mutilated paintings and a grainy Urdu poem reverie for Beat Generation icon Allen Ginsberg stuck in a loop, confronts visitors to an otherwise tidy space in Aspinwall House. An undisturbed adjoining room compounds the sense of vandalism.
For Salman Toor, who paints with the expectation of creating masterpieces, taking a scissor to his works was a way to recreate memories, perhaps even lend them a historic quality. The oil-on-canvas paintings were created in response to the poem by poet-in-exile Hasan Mujtaba.
“The cuts resembled splatters of thick paint or oil and maybe even boundaries from a map. I reassembled them on a wall and projected a video of Hasan’s recitation onto this collage to create a translucent overlapping,” said Toor.
His collaboration with Mujtaba for Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) 2016, titled ‘The Revelation Project’, came about after meeting the poet - exiled by the Zia-ul-Haq regime for political dissent after writing on the persecution of minorities in his native Sindh - at a dinner party.
“Mujtaba recited this poem about a Fifth Avenue Hare Krishna who reminded him of Ginsberg. The poem drew connection points between the shimmering Hudson River to the heritage of the Indus, claiming both and oscillating between insolence and sensuousness,” Toor said.