GOUTAM GHOSH

STANDARD (OSLO)

PRESS RELEASE

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GOUTAM GHOSH

".... ASCRIBING TO THEM BIRTH, ANIMATION, SENSE AND ACCIDENT ..."

27.02.2015-04.04.2015 / Preview: Friday 27.02.2015 / 19.00-21.00

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ABSTRACTION - MECHANISM - SYMBOLISM

"....ascribing to them birth, animation, sense and accident..." I would like to talk about "accidents" in terms of chaos, noise and abstraction; when the phenomenon of abstraction gets associated with the collapse and decomposition of "matter". The geological process might stand as being crucial in the decomposing of the earth - what we call death (samadhi), although throughout the entire process of death, it gets split as matter & pulse (spanda). It is a quantitative phenomenon that occurs in rhythms and cycles and can for example be measured in heartbeats per minute: it can also be located across the geography of the body. The task is simple but made complicated by the distracting and mercurial nature of the mind. The mind is a spinning vortex, a cacophony of nerves screaming out senses that are hungrily searching.

It would be difficult to create an exhaustive list of manifestations, but they are all within the elemental spectrum. Often the first to appear is sound and later, spanda (matter & pulse) also crystallises into light. Somehow this entire phenomena of pulse has collapsed into methodical structures, systems and mechanisms, which have measured, calculated and assimilated into principles of formal logic that operate in the whole system. These principles of formal logic do not necessarily tie with mathematics, but it defiantly lies before us when mathematics takes it over.

Natural philosophy began to explain the world as a system consisting of fixed rules that could be determined mathematically. Nature was shown not to be divinely inspired, as was taught by the church, but worked as fixed law in the book of "super nature". However after the advent of enlightenment rationality, law, polity, economy and natural philosophy became a secular subject beyond the church. The entire process that was once one mass of knowledge became divided into religion, science and magic. The displayed works in this exhibition, film, drawings and paintings attempt to establish a link between the sacred and the secular, which departed at some historical juncture.

Spectrography and Astrology/jyotish (study of light) are studying the same thing, but while spectrography is using an extroverted approach, jyotish's approach is introverted. The spectrographer uses an instrument that separates light into a frequency spectrum and records the signal using a camera, whereas the jyotshi would first acknowledge the sensation of light then study how the perception of that would affect the behaviour of his body mind.

- Goutam Ghosh & Kaustubh Dehlvi Das (Researching scholar on religious study at Centre for Social Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India)

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Goutam Ghosh (b. 1979, Nabadwip) lives and works in Santiniketan, India. He received his MA of Fine Arts from Oslo Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo, Norway, and from Maharaja Sayaji Rao University, Baroda, Gujarat, India. This is his first solo exhibition.

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Installation photography: Vegard Kleven