Search for The Banal
Vandana
2015
Performance Still
5:14 Minutes
©Vandana The Artist
Courtesy Vandana The Artist
DESCRIPTION
Search for The Banal opens in a personal, private space — a row of lockers belonging to others — and ends on the public street outside. The video is shot through a glass window at a specific time of day to balance natural outside light with electric inside light, producing an in-between space — neither fully interior nor exterior, neither private nor public. Within this space, two contradictory elements unfold in parallel: a philosophical conversation between a Buddhist nun and a girl on the question of true nature, and my act of searching strangers’ lockers and discovering a toy — red horns — that I place on my head before stepping out into the street.
The toy carries innocence, mischievousness, and barbarousness at once. It functions as a symbol of banality — the kind of belonging one must adopt to camouflage oneself in the mesmerism of a city, to be readable within a culture not one’s own. The work emerges from my unsettling transitional state in London, as an artist searching for a sense of belonging while questioning what would have to be performed or surrendered in order to be recognised. The juxtaposition of the locker (private interior) and the street (public exterior), of the philosophical discussion (real nature) and the toy (constructed identity), problematises the boundary between real and unreal, original and assumed.
Vandana 