The Creative Process: The Arts of War (Spring 2017)

Spring 2017
The Arts of War
are deceptive; his bricolage embodies a
sophisticated play with multiple historical
horizons.
Kausik’s fellow professor at KRVIA, where he teaches, Sonal
Sundararajan, writes about his work:
This is the sort of meta story that hovers over the
table, like a spectral ghost. Of a time of such
fleeting obsolescence that barely have you been
able to call something your own, that another
comes to replace it. The detritus of a time of a
perpetual present, of a time of ‘nostalgia for only
the present’ piles up higher and higher - in the
shops in chor bazaar, in the scrap markets, in the
landfills, in attics and cupboards. Perhaps in all
the exiled and discarded objects lying at the
margins lie the repressed desires of the home and
the city.
One of the most pressing questions that the use of discarded articles
raises for the viewer is about the nature of memory. Is our memory
of war dictated as much by what is not told through generations and
through cultural and historical archives? Kausik would seem to agree
with this proposition. The fleeting nature of memory, and its
inherent inconsistency is highlighted by putting two soldiers who
waltz around in the water, with no idea of they are truly doing, stuck
in an animated suspension. Are they truly the Balwans that the piece
is titled after?
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