To Experience Aurality: Synaesthetic Notations with Veeranganakumari Solanki

How does one decentre vision? Can an alternate way of perceiving and making images present radical possibilities of space and temporality in the slippage between absence and presence, image and sound? Curated by Veeranganakumari Solanki, Synaesthetic Notations recently opened as a part of the 8th Serendipity Arts Festival 2023 at the Old Goa Medical College (GMC) in Panjim, Goa. Presenting works across different mediums, the exhibition offers a compilation of experiences created by individuals and collectives who have explored visual imagery and sound as their primary senses. In this edited excerpt, Solanki spoke about her approach to curating the visual arts programming of the festival and the initial inquiries into sound-based works through various material iterations for the show. 

Arundhati Chauhan (AC): As the curator for the visual arts programming at the festival, what were some of your initial nodes or critical points for thinking through this particular edition? 

Veeranganakumari Solanki (VS): I think, for me, it was a lot of how Future Landing happened last year. What was beautiful about Future Landing was that almost every work was activated through audience participation. Given how many people are at Serendipity and that it has a festival feel to it, as opposed to when you have a visual arts exhibition, there is a seriousness to the curation as well. But it is also about what people will take away as an experience. That is what I really enjoyed about Future Landing. Even though it started online, we tried to create that experience when we brought it to the festival in this space last year. So that was something that I definitely wanted to carry forward.

Something that I have been thinking about is the arrival and departure of and from the image. Because the way we think—and memory comes in as a layer to this as well—is that we often try and construct an image or words to remember, and that is also where sound comes in. When I was thinking about sound and images, I moved towards the idea of synaesthesia. Because everything that one does, unless we consciously separate it, has this is self-awareness that comes in where you almost step away from the experience. But you need to allow for this loss of control and just be in that moment where, when you think back, you realise that if sound is present, the image cannot be absent, or if an image is present, then sound cannot be absent… We go through life in a way where we are not separating ourselves from our senses—saying, “Oh this only touch, or sight, or smell”; there is none of that. It is how we literally experience everything. Then what would it mean for artists to think through that format? And again, memory became a major layer of how they approached it too.

AC: There is a lot of affinity with the interdisciplinary nature of the Serendipity Arts Festival itself as it weaves together forms, themes and locations. How were you thinking about these aspects, histories and multifocal approaches with reference to your curation for the visual arts programming this year?

VS: When we started talking about sound and the image, it was not about separating one or the other. Serendipity as a festival is a space where you could step out of any of the visual arts exhibitions and into a performance, theatre, or something around food. And it is all around one another, where one thing merges with the other. You enter a space thinking, “Okay, now I am going in for a play” or “I am going in for a performance,” but everything exists as a part of the festival. It is a festival that does not separate an exhibition from a concert. This is something that Vidya [Shivadas] and I spoke about when we were talking about the spaces because we have our exhibitions at the GMC. And with sound, we both agreed that it had to be on the second floor, so that it would travel up and would not disturb the exhibitions. This is something that the Serendipity team also thought about when they were planning the programming in the venue this year.

AC: Synaesthetic Notations posits an approach to considering image and image-making that decentre vision in a sense, particularly in your way of thinking through sound, or constructing an image in the mind's eye, for instance. What were some of the aspects that you considered when you were speaking with the artists or considering what work to include in the exhibition? 

VS: I will give you an example of one work—only one—because I am not going to give away too many artists. The work that you will first experience as you walk up the staircase is Shezad Dawood’s Passages, made in collaboration with British composer Steve Beresford. There were three layers to how this work was thought about. The first is Olivier Messiaen’s scales, where the scales themselves provide a sort of synaesthetic aesthetic effect, because Beresford was looking at a reproduction of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Then you hear Dawood’s voice reading out Edgar Allen Poe’s poems as well. Suddenly, there is a visual being converted into sound, but it is also a play on our perception. For instance, when you consciously think about it, you realise how your steps are being determined by the sound itself, which is clicking with you subconsciously. I remember I spoke with Dawood about this work in 2019, and, at some point, it became something that has stayed with me. When I started thinking about sound and the image, this was one of the works that came up, which is where the exhibition begins. And this idea carries on through the space. With so many of the other artists, you will come across rooms where there is only sound and no visuals; or there will be visuals that almost make you look for the sound because you cannot see the source of the sound. Then there are works in which, when you enter the space, the sound moves with you. This experience is something that the artists have thought about. But through all of this, there are elements of either their immediate environment, or of memory that are coming in. I feel that the way we remember is always connected with another one of our senses.

AC: In your curatorial note, you mention works that exist in the interstitial spaces between absence and presence, but also point to new ways to consider aspects that almost slipped through the cracks at some point. Would you like to expand on that a bit more? Here, I am also thinking about the kind of absences that are present in archives or histories that might exist sometimes as oral narratives, or memories that do not really transform into direct imagery. 

VS: With absence and presence, there are two ways one could think about it. But what you mentioned about the absence of a voice from the archive is like an absence that was not heard and may not have been missed. But with synaesthesia, that absence is something that is realised because it does not complete the experience. There is a desire for it to be present. Or then the absence is the reason why you feel a certain way, and so you want it to remain absent; it is almost like an absence that you desire. I feel that is where one could think of absence in a different way from the absence that exists in an archive as a void. But the moment this becomes too much presence, and what we spoke about earlier, if one had to think of presence in a way where it is almost surveillant, is also important. I recently read the essay “The Imaginal World and Modern Oblivion: Kiarostami’s Zig-Zag” by Joan Copjec, where she talks about this idea of “lumen” and “lux.” Lumen is when you have meaning coming from within. Whereas with lux, it is this idea of surveillance, which is where you are overexplaining or overthinking it, but there is no space for that void from which you can start creating or start thinking again. Here, that void and that absence are so important. And that is also how one experiences synaesthesia, because you do not have everything at once. You are not exposed entirely, because of which there is a certain magic to how one may feel; there is no one way to go through something, or how memories are created. In some ways, because it is something absent that you create a memory; you do not try and push it away. You want to sort of keep it and keep adding to it in some sense.

AC: So then it also subverts how we empirically approach things like memory-making or archiving. I think that existing in that void can also act as a generative space and allow us to rethink a lot of our expectations.

VS: Yes, for instance, Hemant Sreekumar is working with live coding. His piece in the show consists of an abstract visual that one will see, but the sound that he is working with is generated audio. It also breaks away from the way we think of perceiving sound as being this composed format of what one has to think about when one approaches sound. He is working with frequencies that are beyond what we can feel as humans. It is almost like being at the threshold of what we find comfortable or not and what our brains are conditioned to receive or not. You enter the space, and then when you leave, you are just trying to understand what you experienced because there may be sounds that you have never experienced previously. 

To learn more about histories of sound as it connects with practices of image making, read Sukanya Deb’s examination of Karthik KG’s video work Seismic Vibrato (2021), Najrin Islam’s essay on SleepCinemaHotel (2018) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Ankan Kazi’s piece on the aural histories of South Asia as explored in Radio Colomboscope (2022). 

To read more about the works at the Serendipity Arts Festival, read Annalisa Mansukhani’s interview with Vidya Shivadas on her show, Turning: On Field and Work, being exhibited at the Old GMC until 23 December 2023.