ISLAMIC VIOLINS
Ed. I (2008), Ed. II (2012). Sculptural installation
, 30 hand-sculpturally treated violins.
Edition 1 of Islamic violins is part of the permanent collection of Devi Arts Foundation, New Delhi
In Islamic Violins 25 white violins explode during a long durational interval and over the course of an unlimited random period of time from early dawn to midnight.
The work questions the notion of violence and its relationship to ideologies and performing bodies as accumulative phenomena. The body of an actual violin is destroyed only to be reconstituted metaphorically through the digital medium that is registered visually and audio-phonically. This single action in duration changes the immediate atmosphere. It is the audible/inaudible reality of an aggressive event and its after effects.
Islamic Violins explores the political dimensions of aesthetic codes in two directions. On the one hand by trying to show that the actual explosion of a non-combat object is essentially staking a claim on the responsibility of the passive observer in participating voyeuristically to an action designed to provoke without stopping it. On the other hand, it explores the difference between normative assumptions about the destruction of the human body and the objectified core of a physical Violin—a fragile object known symbolically.
