Dialogue – InComplete Absence
Vandana
2017
Artist Book
Paper and wood
©Vandana
Courtesy of the Artist
Description
Dialogue – InComplete Absence (2017) is an artist book that began inside another work. The installation InComplete Absence — a wooden shed plastered white by hand — was built as a space in which one can sit and speak with one’s own Self. Inside it, something began to happen that does not happen in the outside world: the artist started listening to her mind. A conversation formed between the mind and the Self, and the book is that conversation, continued on paper.
The book borrows the form of a novel — nine chapters, an index deliberately avoided, a montage structure that moves back and forth through two years of works and the life surrounding them — and it ends, deliberately, without conclusion. Its text comes from a zone between memory and imagination: the traces of mental and physical experience on one’s psyche. Performances, material works, and encounters pass through its pages as thoughts pass through a quiet room. The book does not document the practice; it extends it — the interior made audible, held open, only once removed from reality. “Art is spirituality with a tinge of impurity,” the artist writes in its preface. The book is the working-out of that sentence.
In brief: An artist book in the form of a dialogue between the mind and the Self, born inside the installation InComplete Absence (MFA Fine Art, Kingston University, London, 2017). Nine chapters, montage structure, no index, no conclusion — a two-year passage through the artist’s works and inner life, written from the zone between memory and imagination.
Vandana 