Paul Purgas. Scattered Fire

24.06.2022 - 06.08.2022

Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Wien / Österreich

Scattered Fire brings together a new body of work exploring the interconnections between Indian and European Modernisms, focusing on the networks of exchange that operated between the artistic and philosophical traditions of Vienna and India, and expanding upon an ongoing research project into the ideological and political forces which encompassed the independence of South Asia.

Working across textiles, sculpture and sound Scattered Fire considers a 1921 public reading of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore’s mystic play The King of the Dark Chamber performed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Vienna as a historic anchor between these two worlds....

Assembled within the exhibition is a collection of recordings of experimental sound and electronic music from an archive of reel-to-reel tapes uncovered by Purgas at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, a school that hybridised the philosophies of the Bauhaus and Ulm with the holistic eco-conscious praxis of Tagore’s revolutionary 19th Century school Shantiniketan. Produced in the late 1960s, excerpts from the tapes are recomposed into a narration of these principles and pedagogies, considering the emergence of experimental sound within a post-colonial imaginary and revisiting these historic recordings as a syncretic bridge between worlds.

[Quelle: Einladung]