VOID AND FORMLESSNESS

Shoonya Ghar (Empty is this house) references a poem by 12th-century poet Gorakhnath, a part of the formal Nirgun tradition, on the themes of emptiness, the void and the formless. It refers to the peregrinations of a man in a city with ten doors, symbolic of the openings of the body. The installation stands in an abandoned quarry, an empty and surreal landscape in which the elaboration of a setting becomes the main protagonist, as the characters come and go.

Sometimes when you see the women or the men or even the empty pillars that seem to echo the music that moves with lithe grace, it is as if we are confronting a vast story that weaves into an unending tapestry of thought. The bearded old man sitting on a chair is time’s traveller. Short motions of simple humble actions add to the alacrity and the elegance of mood. with God instead of ritualistic idol worship. For Sudarshan, Nirgun poetry is more than a vehicle of spiritual awakening; it marks a milestone in his artistic journey as it brings on the fabric of humanism in the many dichotomies of time and its being.

The film is an auratic discourse of aesthetic structure, cosmic space, three conventions of cinema as parallel streams building of structure, while the structure is being built around the performance of the actors. The relationship built between the actors is also a design in dialogue. It brings in polarities – the reclaimed wood is new but the structures are old in time – there is an artifice in the setting up, it plays between what is meaningful and meaningless in terms of the fragments and the fragility of time and being.