The Way Home

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

- Chinki Sinha

अब मैं एक छोटे-से घर और बहुत बड़ी दुिनया में रहता हूं कभी मैं एक बहुत बड़े घर और छोटी-सी दुिनया में रहता था कम दीवारों से बड़ा फ़र्क पड़ता है दीवारें न हों तो दुिनया से भी बड़ा हो जाता है घर — कुंवर नारायण

(Now I live in a small house and a vast world. Once, I lived in a very big house and a small world. Fewer walls make a huge difference. If there are no walls, the house becomes larger than the world itself.)

THERE is a door in a corner of the room. A concrete steel door that won’t open. Light peeps out from behind it. A mere door can be so many things at once—welcome, temptation, hesitation, fear, security, privacy and abandonment. You stand there and remember the doors you have closed and opened in life.

This one door you’d like to open. That’s where the artist Subodh Gupta takes us. To that point where we confront our lives, ourselves, our past and our future.

He calls it ‘Door’. He made it in 2007.

In his exhibition, ‘The Way Home’, which opened at the Bihar Museum in Patna earlier this month, the artist has looped in memory with longing and there’s regret, there’s the sense of loss and there is that audacity of hope because nothing is fully lost. You could begin at the door.

Or anywhere else. There is no singular pathway, no method to this curation.

It is intended to be like a labyrinth. Once you enter, you emerge again somewhat changed.

In the other room, on a wall, there are larger-than-lifesize steel mirrors that begin to disrupt the image of you. There is that jarring sound. White noise, a static-like sound that cancels out the immediate. Wrapped in this audio blanket, you step into the memory landscape.

The image of the self blurs and you go into another time zone as another version, a dissolved one.

Perhaps that’s the Time Machine we have always wanted.