One Life Many presents the India premiere of Sudarshan Shetty’s eponymous film. Alongside the film, a suite of assemblages provoke the audience to explore the lines that merge and separate the real and illusory in everyday life. The film situates a well known myth about the transformations of the self which is told in variations across South Asia. One version tells of a sage who is transformed into a woman, wife and mother before returning. One Life Many situates this story in a contemporary world that is re-awakening after a period of brutal isolation and introspection. In this rare, globally shared moment, the world mirrors the turmoils and transformations of selves. The possibilities of multiple selves within one and the protagonist’s awakening in different worlds leads the artist to questions around memory, return, transformation and the role of narrative in that process.
The juxtaposition of cinema and tangible forms of media, especially the recasting of everyday objects that are part of our media ecologies — telephones, typewriters, projectors as well as mundane domestic objects like teacups — creates a theater of quotidian life. One Life Many interrogates the quintessential spaces of modern memory making and experience — theater, museum and cinema — through this series of assemblages of object bodies joined together in unexpected ways, serving as portals for us to question the real and the illusory and the role that objects play as evidence or appendages to the self.
Tying cinema, theater and museum, the show creates a unique space between real, surreal and hyperreal, heightening our perception of indeterminate selves in uncertain states of being and worlding. In a fraught and conflicted world, where identity is a key political asset, the artist takes an oblique approach. One Life Many explores experiences of self and world that tie us together, neither heightening the specificity of individual experience nor subsuming them into empty universals. "We are individually multiple", these resonant words of the renowned Indian musician Pandit Kumar Gandharva, serves as an important reference for the artist.
Exhibition Note by Vyjayanthi Rao (Visiting Professor, Yale School of Architecture and Co-Editor in Chief, Public Culture, Duke University Press)
Artist Note
“The seed of this exhibition lies in a folk story that I heard a long time ago, that comes together in a video and a suite of objects to be seen in a certain order of display, in a way of retelling the story, in as many ways as possible. Retelling is the life blood of oral traditions ensuring a sense of community and recalling wisdom that has evolved through centuries. How else can we make sense of our present? In my role as an artist, I would like to see my work as a mediation between how I am conditioned to belong in a structure that is dictated by the western canons, and a life, as I see from where I belong, outside of it.”
GALLERYSKE presents One Life Many at IFBE, Mumbai from 6 - 17 January, 2024. Along with a new body of works, the exhibition will entail the Indian premiere of Shetty’s eponymous film.
Words Platform Desk
Date 08.01.2024