Conversations in Hyperreality

Solo show | Experimenter, Kolkata | 2012  

Vinyl sticker wall texts, digital prints on paper, drawings, digital printed books (3), neon light works and video with ambient sound.

Gallery write-up:

Saira Ansari’s work is derived from responding to aggressive and vividly visual personal dreams and hallucinatory experiences that the she has experienced for most of her memory. Her primary interest over the last few years has been to work around the experience of lucid dreaming, tonic immobility, nightmares, and letters of communication that represent physical and mental displacement. Off-hand drawings and texts are studies of her own, deep-seated thoughts that provide a fleeting glimpse into her complex mind. Some works therefore are very casual records while some visuals are interpretations of scientific research and studies conducted in studying dreams and human psychology.

Ansari’s practice deals with uncomfortable dialogue, a dialogue that is loud, probing and insolent, but often ignored for the sake of sanity or even politeness and the etiquette of normalcy. She translates this dialogue into written text, sometimes directly scribbled on the walls of private and public spaces, in most instances within her drawings and journals and at other times through audio renderings. Text swathes her practice to emerge as a medium as significant as any other if not more. Conversations in Hyperreality at first sight, does not seem cohesive, but at the same time assumes the position of a storyteller and creates a visual allegory of the existence of two very important ‘realities’ that conjoin to form a sense of apparent truths where irrational thoughts, repetitive ideas, and unrealistic fears loom and interweave to create an imaginary scaffolding of conversations. Likewise the seepage of the real in this hyperreality often add an absurd logic that helps direct hysterical fantasies to a stable lull, only to resume it at another imaginary, fantastical conversation.