I The Flame
Vandana
2018
Performance (Long Durational)
175 Hours (22 days)
Marina Abramovic Institute MAI (bacc, Bangkok Art Biennale 2018)
©Vandana The Artist
Photo by Preecha Pattara, Courtesy of the Artist
A photograph of this performance was included in the Marina Abramović Institute archive, exhibited at Kochi Muziris Biennale 2025–26
DESCRIPTION
I The Flame investigates the shift from concentration to awareness — the passage from thinking to not thinking — through sustained, unbroken contact with a burning flame over 175 hours across 22 days. The flame functions as an anchor: when a thought crosses the mind, I return to the present by audibly saying — I’m looking at the flame. This spoken act is the only script the performance carries. Everything else unfolds.
If the eyes look away from the flame by chance, I light a new candle. Before a burning candle is about to finish, I light another from it to maintain the constancy and flow of energy — an uninterrupted shifting of gaze from one flame to the next.
Over the duration, the most basic acts — eating, walking, sitting — slow down and extend, pulled into the rhythm of the flame. What this prolongation reveals is the irony of how we ordinarily perform these same acts without awareness, disconnected from our own living. The sustained gaze does not produce stillness. It produces a gradual, relentless confrontation between the body’s habitual state and the Self’s capacity for presence.
The title comes from the belief that the Soul resides in the body in the form of a flame. To gaze at the flame is to gaze at what one already carries within — the one who looks and the flame that is looked at are no longer separate.
Vandana 