Mundane Silence Personified
Vandana
2012
Performance for video
31:25 Minutes
©Vandana The Artist
Courtesy Vandana The Artist
DESCRIPTION
Part of the Silence series, Mundane Silence Personified confronts the power of mundane silence — inner and outer — to generate obsessive, cyclical thinking. The act of drinking, vomiting, and drinking again presents the way silence compels thoughts to grow, multiply, and repeat: the brain requires more to swallow, to chew, to bring out, to take in again, and this cycle keeps repeating itself. The body becomes the site where this invisible mental process is made physical — what normally circulates unseen inside the mind is forced into the open.
I appear wearing white, sitting on a covered commode in a washroom. I drink a jugful of water. I vomit that water out into a steel tray used in medical surgery. I drink my vomit. I vomit into the tray again. I drink my vomit again and keep repeating the process until I am exhausted.
I see Water as thoughts; transparent, invisible but powerful enough to make one restless.
Vandana 