As a local artist, I was battling a different kind of unease. I couldn’t subdue the feeling that being a Kashmiri, I had to cut through the overdosed metaphors and punctuated annotations. I did not want to end up doing the kind of art I do not approve of. I had a serious problem with the re/ presentation of the violence as a battle that will perhaps outlive the artist. The first ten days of the fifteen were consumed by the impulse to make a video installation of the Khoj Kasheer workshop itself, intending some kind of meta-project or a spoof on the mechanics and machinery involved in the propagation/promotion/propaganda of art in a society which has been witness to the most gruesome atrocities and the unforgettable violation of human rights in the past twenty years. But the workshop ambience was not exactly what I had imagined it to be.

The installation that I eventually settled on is a tripod on which the ontological positioning of a local, in the present context of a conflict-ridden identity, is choosing the frame to live with. Titled Choose Yourself, the work proposes the triangular trap where there is no exit from the given choices-the ritual/spiritual in the act of tying a wish knot; the visceral/material engagement with the kangri; the camouflaged hangman’s noose anticipating the empirical/political/psychological gesture in the contemplation of suicide. And from an actual/aesthetic distance, the overall ambience (gestalt), in contention with the elements it is made of, comes as a disguise evoking a delightful complacency. As the evening approaches, all the temptations for warmth, implicit in the presences like the kangri and the colorful threads pregnant with unfulfilled wishes, is ignited by the counter-presence of the light bulbs. The only thing that remains more or less the same is the subtle, yet ominous presence of the hangman’s noose hiding behind the branches and green leaves of magnolia, camouflaged and lurking.

Instead of the picturesque chinar, I chose the magnolia tree for its local associations to the legends, alluding to economic prosperity and vice versa. In the recent political history of Kashmir the evolution of signifiers/perceptions like the kangri adopted new meanings where it became an instrument of protest. The work addresses the local psyche and traverses through existential accesses like submission which finds recourse into spiritual resistance by visiting shrines, wailing, tying knots; saturated with the monstrosity of abortive political negotiations, the cathartic resolutions in the supernatural and disillusioned with the paralysis of the present, man looks upwards, contemplating the hangman’s noose.

The uniformity in design and the circular movement of the installation is suggestive of a tawaf-like ritualistic experience in which the viewer undergoes a trance of the fabulous and the monstrosity of the monotonous.