Platform for Intuitive Research

upcoming publication

I lived in Delhi for several years, fifteen minutes by tuk-tuk from the Majnu Ka Tilla area. On this small piece of land between the Ring Road and the Yamuna River, the Indian government allowed Tibetan refugees to build a refugee camp in the 1960s. While wandering around Majnuka, I also came to a strip of fields between the river and the Tibetan colony. 

„The water is always very dirty. Whenever I bathe, my skin itches. There are a lot of broken statues of Hindu goddesses in the river.“
May 2019, Yamuna river, Delhi

Pollution Diaries is a collectively written text, composed of posts from a WhatsApp group that was active from May 2019 to April 2020. 

Curatorial exhibition. Artist: Monika Hniková (CZ). University of Delhi, North Campus, February 2023.

“The overall heavy metal pollution index value of theYamuna river was found to be 1492 that is far above the critical pollution index value of 100, above which the overall pollution level should be considered unacceptable.”[1]

Off-site exhibition. Veronika Resslová, Sumanshu Rao, Bhupendra Kumar, Pryianshi Gupta, Param Dharam Singh, Man Mohan, Manish Gupta, Abhishek Stephen, Pragya Sing, Vishal Sen. University of Delhi, North Campus, November 2019.

Whenever I bathe in Yamuna, my skin itches. 

Whenever I quickly go out from an air-conditioned room, I get heatstroke. 

Whenever I ride on public transport, it’s like an oven. 

Whenever I sit down to eat, I can taste dust. 

Whenever I wake up, the first thing I hear is: Let’s dust the house!

A gallery for (not only) text and visual art on the cyclo-rickshaws. Delhi, North Campus, 2019 - 2023.

Most cyclo-rickshaw drivers don't have phones. 

They don't have mirrors, and if they do, they're dim.

They have no pictures of themselves.

I don't want to take pictures of them. They wouldn't refuse, but pointing a camera at them seems brutal and disrespectful. I don't speak their language yet, and they wouldn't feel comfortable. They are thin, often visibly exhausted. They have tough bodies and a carefree street style - they wear whatever they're given or what they find. 

Video intervention. Abandoned shop with Russian delicacies next to the Refugee Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. Prague, 2016.

The piece was composed of the statements written by my students, asylum seekers in the Czech Republic, during their lessons of the Czech language. From the texts of 12 respondents of different nationalities, I selected sentences that briefly capture situations from their lives before and after emigration. The resulting metatext of 77 sentences constitutes their collective voice. 

This recording presents personal testimonies through interviews that open up questions of identity, social structure and the situation in the Czech Indian community at the end of the socialist regime, as well as questions about the essence of camping, and examines the differences within Euroindian subculture, and its relationship to the contemporary Indians of North America.

language: CZ
duration: 23:15

 

Curatorial exhibition. Galerie Školská 28. Praha, 2015.

“If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.“[1]

Site-specific intervention for daylight and ambient light, 2014. Metal bars, translucent paper. Time-lapse recording of one day.

Because I live on the ground floor, where the sun doesn't reach very often, I don't like winter. When I get up late because I've been working all night, there's not much daylight left. A computer screen that lights up at the touch of a button makes me feel like I can work at any time. I go to bed when I'm done. 

Site-specific installation for daylight, 2013. Wooden planks, translucent paper, cinema seats. Time-lapse recording of one day.

I always wanted to be free, although I didn't really know what that meant. I can't get rid of my body. I can't get rid of a set of immediate circumstances either, I can only try to change them through exhausting effort. But as time goes by, I have no desire to do that. They are like frames of a film. Of course I don't want to watch a bad movie, but I'm no longer captivated by the beauty of a good one either.

Site-specific intervention. Acrylic painting, 3x5 m. 2003.

If we were on retreat on a mountain, we could try to observe the space between us and the other mountains. If  only we could learn to perceive as one this space and the space that our own bodiestake up! In such a unified space, how might things exist?

Before World War I, my great-grandparents left Bohemia for Ukraine. Half a century later, their children fled the Communists and returned to Czechoslovakia, but they didn't feel at home there. The faded photographs they brought back captured the silhouette of a farmhouse in an apple orchard. 

From a young age, although I could not relate the feeling to anything I knew, there was something missing in my existence. It was a deep dark, transparent, empty space looking at itself. All households evoked a strange, subtle anxiety in me. 

Identification with the body keeps one's mind within the boundaries of the body. Therefore, one divides space into the space of one's own body and the space in which other bodies exist.

 
Let’s imagine that our body suddenly dissolves but we remain conscious. What will then exist in its place? 

In the process of modelling, the mind moves freely in the space that contains all bodies, the boundaries of which are only visual.