In Person: On De/Consecration in HOLY FLUX!
Consider an object, an entity, a bazaar and with it the material and metaphysical regimes that govern the organisation of space, place and temporal exchanges. Curated by The Packet, HOLY FLUX! invited artists to “de/consecrate or re-consecrate from the margins,” as mentioned in their curatorial note. Consisting of multimedia installations and object-oriented ephemera, the works—commissioned by the collective for the 8th edition of the Serendipity Arts Festival—explore the possibilities of confronting the contemporaneous aspects of ritual and the sacral. From explorations of cross-border exchanges as they unfold in the red tape of bureaucratic transit to the rituals of border diplomacy as seen through rice, HOLY FLUX! invites the artist, the viewer and the consumer to engage in elements of play to reconsider the sacral object, whether as architecture and lived environment, interpersonal identities transposed in popular visual cultures in the space of a bedroom, or enacting the marketplace through contentious identity politics.
The show features commissioned works and performances by publicganja x Chutney Mary, Syed Ali Sarvat Jafri, Leyya Mona Tawil, Khalid Jauffer, Smita Urmila Rajmane, Sharika Navamani and Imaad Majeed, Chu Hao Pei, Umber Majeed, Kitty Ritig, Bilaal Raji Saheed, and The Packet. In this walkthrough, members of The Packet, as well as participating artists Smita Urmila Rajmane and Chu Hao Pei, take us through the exhibition and works on display.
The Packet is made up of a group of artists from Sri Lanka with a particular focus on hyper-locality, collaborative processes and conversation. They work in print, digital, performance and site-specific interventions located in the playful and the intimate. In response to a stratified and exclusionary world, they adopt a posture of collective study that is encompassed by, to paraphrase Fred Moten, “what we do with other people.”
(Featured image: Installation view of Return the Slab by Khalid Jauffer.)
Recorded on 17 December 2023.
HOLY FLUX! is being exhibited at the ESG as a part of the 8th Serendipity Arts Festival in Panjim, Goa, until 23 December 2023.
To learn more about The Packet, revisit Veeranganakumari Solanki’s curated album of their work.
To read more about ASAP | art’s coverage of this year’s Serendipity Arts Festival, read Arundhati Chauhan’s conversation with Veeranganakumari Solanki on her exhibition Synaesthetic Notations as well as Annalisa Mansukhani in conversation with Vidya Shivadas on her show Turning: On Field and Work and with Ravi Agarwal on his shows Time as a Mother and Blue Carbon, co-curated with Damian Christinger and Jahnavi Phalkey respectively.
