-+20Hz/Freezing
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Exhibition

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DEC 2023

WORKS
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Curatorial note
by Sharmillie Rahman
Curator
  The fervour of a zeitgeist where time past, present and future are contained in a ‘block’; where people traverse/dwell in multiple geopolitical spaces all at the same time, moreover, the personalized, dialogical logic of a pervasive social phenomenon, aka ‘information groundswell’ renders each a producer and a consumer participating in a cultural shift by forging new connections “among dispersed media content” –all of it-- informs the exhibition entitled, “-+20Hz/Freezing”
Juxtaposing diverse materials, playfully upending their known relationships, Murshed Jahangir dives into the very workings of our existence. These art-objects/acts embody Jahangir’s own reading into the chaos and choreography of time-space-mind-matter—continuously shifting in pitch, in rhythm, in momentum, in ratio—to emerge within the realm of a dialogic interplay. He negotiates his own ‘cognitive dissonance’ resulting from having to endure internal/interpersonal conflicts, mindless societal discrepancies and political megalomania played out on the world stage by infusing a trail of disjunctive meanings into the seemingly irrational, critically provocative works that appear before us in the form of an unorthodox intermedial/intertextual mind-matter experiments.

Expanding on Bergsonian élan vital, Elizabeth Grosz argues,

Life, that excess within matter that seeks to extend matter beyond itself and its present forms, is not the ‘origin’ of the virtual but rather one of its modes of actualization, the potentiality of matter itself, insofar as matter is the material of life as well as non-life.

In addition to this observation which aligns with the central thrust of this exhibition, we summon Comay and Ruda’s provocative dash (punctuation mark). Hinging on its semantic openness, it is an invitation to unravel various closed circuits of ‘knowing’, in this case, premeditated assumptions around the trope of experientiality. Inspired by the spirit of the dash, or if one may, Murshed Jahangir’s drawings-tree-dimensional objects-kinetic sculptures- installations-video work-sonic work-text- proposes to plumb the depths of experience by suspending one’s primacy of consciousness so as to unleash a freedom for the very experience to ‘sound out’, unaided.

When the ear picks up the sub-sonic arising out of the hidden labyrinth of the earth’s trauma, we freeze in disbelief/disgust; and hasten to ‘unground’ ourselves from the "sources of the self”—here, Jahangir transgresses sociohistorical positions with the help of sardonic humour. And the resultant body of works is transposed with traces of dismantled human anatomy  indicating a dethroning of ‘centrism’. It’s gaps and fissures and porosity become a window onto the world, unravelling itself in dashes ad infinitum toward change undefinable. 

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