Aanal Chandaria

Reading Hobson - Jobson, A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases made me think of the hob daughters and job daughters and hyphenated cultural realities. The thought of India not being a home is foreign to me.

Food its history and sociology give me constant ‘food for thought’. There are recipes and there are rituals, where the good foods of this earth become potent symbols, deep with mystic, mythic and metaphorical association.

The proverb “Home is where the Hearth is” rings true to me. As does “You are what you Eat.”

The Evolution and Elocution of Love is a post pandemic vignette and installation that sets out space and room for interaction. Bringing Rasa theory to the palette and palate in good humour it stages, taking from ideas described in the Natya Shastra, attributed to Bharata Muni and ideas of drama more generally.

The aesthetic theory it asserts, is that entertainment is a desired effect of performance arts, but not the primary goal. The primary goal is to move the audience into another parallel reality, full of wonder where they experience the essence of their own consciousness, and reflect on spiritual and moral questions.

Featuring a sculpture of Lucy Lucretia Lakshmi Lilibet Luchita and a portrait of Nyum Nyum Vertumnus, based on Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s portrait of Rudolf II of Hungary and Bohemia it carries Charles Darwin’s salient message, “We are a part of not apart from”.

The golden 24 Carat Kesar Quality keri or mango, a king of fruits, is suspended between them.

Behind them, prints that define their evolution, time of revolution and room for resolution. A catalogue entry of Jean Simeon Chardin’s Simian, The Monkey Painter of 1740, attesting to the craze for singerie and symbolically questioning ‘Am I a good artist or simply a good student?’. An image of a cast of AL 288 - 1 Lucy, the 3.2 million year old plant eating hominin from the Afar triangle in the Awash valley of Ethiopia discovered in 1974. A reproduction of a print by William Hogarth of The Analysis of Beauty Plate 1, complete with the 7 stages of the S-shaped Serpentine Curved line that in his opinion excited the attention of the viewer and evoked liveliness and movement. 

As Octavio Paz writes, “Love is one of the clearest examples of that double instinct which causes us to dig deeper into our own selves and at the same time to emerge from our selves in another : death and re-creation, solitude and communion.” ’The Dialectic of Solitude’ in The Labyrinth of Solitude, 2008.

Ideas of He equals aime see squared are never far from my mind as I think through how Einstein’s equation and formula could be expressed by Lucy Lucretia Lakshmi Lilibet Luchita as an aside to Nyum Nyum Vertumnus.