‘The Longest March: Stretched Bodies’
Performance
Title: A Magician from ‘The Longest March’
Venue: KNMA Saket
The performance A Magician from ‘The Longest March’ is based on the story of a magician who embodies multiple characters and attempts to understand the layers of various marches that have happened across time and place. This performance is part of the programming for the exhibition Very Small Feeling.
Performance
Title: Ek Minute Ka Maun (A Minute of Silence)
Locations: Multiple spaces in Delhi and Greater Noida
This performance/live art, held across multiple sites in Delhi and NCR, serves as a poignant response to the profound journey experienced during the COVID-19 lockdown. This series of performative acts aims to absorb and honor the silence for those who undertook the longest march home, many losing their lives in the process. Through this, we reflect on their resilience and sacrifice, transforming urban spaces into stages of remembrance and solidarity.
Title: The Longest March: Stretched Bodies
Duration: 4.23 Minutes
Conceived by: ABR
The work offers a unique psychological viewpoint, describing traumatic experiences that stretch the body beyond its limits of bearability and sanity. It presents landscapes as pained entities composed of belabored parts, like amputated limbs that continue their functions long after trauma has struck, until exhaustion claims them.
The video features a collage of various body parts, emphasizing their labors rather than their relationship to the whole. The march of feet, resembling the trot of a horse, briefly falters before resuming. A head in a yellow construction helmet bobs frantically, trying to keep up. A lone mouth masticates. These parts, like severed limbs, continue their actions long after the stimulus has been removed, eventually transforming into bodyscapes. At this point, the body becomes indistinguishable from its surroundings, turning into a pure affect.
For the artist, these painful abstractions can open paths to general empathy while also highlighting its limits. While we can use our own painful experiences to empathize with others, we can never fully grasp their pain in its entirety.
