INDIA / SOUTH AFRICA

Pehram Des Visaal: Roving the ands of Union, 2022,

Mix media installation, variable dimensions.

In a time that is torn with the calls of war, the artist conjures moments of syncretic energy, articulated across a visual installation and a musical collaboration. The work stages a conversation between two mystic poets separated by space and time, the Turkish Yunus Emre and the Indian Kabir Saheb. Their Imaginary conversation unfolds across a painted cloth scroll that forms a fluid ground upon which their two boats row, Twilight language that draws on the idea of the liminal, is an old friend of mediaeval poets from Turkey and India. It represents a bridge between the Sufi and the Bhakti movements that were dynamically moving across the Eurasian plains.

Yunus Emre and Kabir built a similar poetic repertoire and used near-identical metaphors and motifs-the pearl divers, the dust, clay, the sea —to speak of worlds separated by three centuries. In their poetry one finds meaning encoded in the skin of words, allowing space for a complex co habitation of ideas and differences.