Concept Note

Today technology can be compared to a flame in which fire has for millennia been man’s most powerful state of extension in nature- an extension that has evolved into the metaphorical flame of thought. Fire is neither good, evil, nor neutral; it is a force that penetrates matter just as the hi-tech model pierces culture and society, altering them. Fire is above all a medium and a metaphor charged with the power to translate. Today fire is the image of immaterial vitality that overruns the world in the form of electric correspondence. In fact, material fire has returned to its place of origin of light, of pure energy.

Playing with Fire is a show which scratches surfaces, voids, and enclosures in the outlook of speculating our life and society as art practitioners. Is it possible to counter the “HyperNormal” where governments, financiers, and technological utopians have, since the 1970s, given up on the complex "real world" and built a simpler "fake world" run by corporations and kept stable by politicians? The triangle of extinction of fire states that for combustion- fuel, heat, and oxygen are the three essential factors. If one of these factors is controlled or eliminated, the fire will be extinguished. Can we think about encountering these methods of extinction- limitation or elimination of the relative factors of combustion? Why are advances in understanding the physiology of the world not incorporated into the current social, political, and economic practices? Why are we deliberately led to a mismatch between technological progress and human consciousness? Error, a consequence of entropy, opens possibilities for the emergence of new paths.

Curated by Sayantan Maitra Boka

Participating Artist:
Bhabatosh Sutar, Mallika Das Sutar, Nirmal Malick, Pintu Sikder, Pradip Das, Raju Sarkar, Ayan Saha, and Tarun Dey .