This essay relooks at the two years of Young Subcontinent Project curated by Riyas Komu in Goa for the Serendipity Arts Festival, organized by the Serendipity Arts Foundation. Here is the link to the essay:
The third cycle of Young Subcontinent shall expand to include Myanmar within its ambit. Here are some images from curator Riyas Komu's visit to the city, and the artist archives!
Reetu Sattar's performance for Young Subcontinent 2017, Goa PWD.
Isnt It Time You Let me Go? II
15 – 19 December
10 am – 6 pm
Reetu Sattar along with Baul Singer Mohd. Aruj Ali, Dhaka
Summary:
Truth is becoming. There is no difference between what you believe and how you live. But according to the western philosophy it feels like truth is an idea.
Another fact is how one knows oneself? His own internal and external left to be explored but he lives as he thinks. It is said this segregation between the subject that is who thinks and objects about what he thinks are the beginning of modernity.
We hardly know our own body as we are given so many obligations to explore. But a practicing Baul is so open as close to as nature, like mud explores life through his own body, by his own body. He is the man whom Heidegger epistemologically referred ‘open’. I become astonished to see how an epistemological idea is totally practiced, understood and explored by our own ‘Fakir’.
‘To be 'divine" in this sense is to remain eternally ‘bortoman’, to exist with the quality of being both the Purush (Subject) and the Prokriti (Process) in the same person (অন্তরঙ্গে কৃষ্ণ বহিরঙ্গে রাধা). Endowed with the capacity to use the given material being, the 'deho' (body) as ‘means of production’ but not merely to create a technological world but to become the divine desiring the divine in and through the material human biological body. This is the primary proposition of Nadiya, and Lalon's is no different. The idea is not to reduce us into biology ending into a higher form of consumer, as we are now in the era of capitalism, imperialism or ‘Empire’.(Farhad Mazhar)
I must include one another clarification here in this note that the songs will be sung in this performance by Aruj Ali Boyati from Jhinaidoho Bangladesh are not music, but Philosophical discourse in Bengal. Philosophical discourse in Bengal, particularly of Bangladesh, is essentially oral. Music is not considered as a performing art, but a linguistic and metaphoric medium to create effects on people, helping them to open their hearts to listen to the call of the divinity that makes a person responsible to others.
This performance is the second phase of the first performance ‘Isn’t it time you let me go?” where by being at the moment of authentic, death questioned the answer of what does it mean to be open? How to be open to the immense possibilities of the world? How is it possible to loose grip on responsibilities on entities but becoming free and open to embrace the essence of Being.
Here with this very question I am trying once again to de-mystify the idea of body and the way of knowing self to the context of forgetting time, as time is an illusion. It doesn’t show us when it goes away.
Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF) calls artists from the countries of India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Maldives and Afghanistan for the third cycle of “Young Subcontinent” curated by Riyas Komu. The project seeks artists whose work explore sightlines of common struggles and aspirations within South Asia and facilitate conversations and narratives of peaceful coexistence and democratic aspirations.
SAF shall offer production grants to selected artists below the age of 45, working with any medium, who will be sponsored to attend the festival in Goa. The project aims to build patronage and at the same time, foreground young unnoticed artists from the subcontinent whose work seek attention.
