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“The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to language’s ineffectiveness as a cognitive modality to fully grasp or describe our very visceral experience of reality. Wittgenstein’s assertion also implies that at any given moment in history, language as a knowledge body remains incomplete – either redefining the past in present terms or visualizing the future in vocabulary that does not yet exist. While the entreaty into codifications of thought may have been a modernist impulse, and even while post- modernist thinkers sought to undo them, it is ironic that contemporary expression – in spite of its deconstructions, inclusions and expansions – continues to remain incongruent vis à vis the authenticity of lived experiences because strive as we might for an infinite and cohesive flow in the repository of ideas, by the very nature of temporality existing in iterative succession, significations is achieved through fractures and fragmentation that sustain and propel the mobility of ideas.
Boats Against the Current presents artists Anju Dodiya, Atul Dodiya, Balkrishna Doshi, Nalini Malani, Ranbir Kaleka, Shilpa Gupta, Sudhir Patwardhan, Sunil Gupta, Zaam Arif and Osman Yousefzada, whose works explore artificial, conceptual constructs of cultural expression and the false dichotomies of time through a reminiscence for worlds that no longer (or not yet) exist objectively, but are individually retained through passion and concern.
