Objects which we need for our everyday functions have proliferated beyond our count and grasp. Our day starts with these objects and ends with them. Instead of us consuming objects, objects start consuming us. They are all over us. One can’t imagine a bedroom without a bed, study table, wardrobe, dressing table etc. We need company of all these and many more objects to make a bedroom feel like a bedroom. A stroll in a shopping mall will show us that there are objects for every little activity. Instead of needs creating objects, objects have today taken charge of formulating human needs. It is not we who decide what we want, it is the object that decides what and how it wants.

Every object has its own form, its own gesture and its own function. Any object that doesn’t satisfy all these conditions is no longer an object. As a collection, these photographs are like variations of unformed objects in their unfinished reality. The ontology of reality here is confused by constantly shifting relationships between the exposed steel bars and a series of everyday rituals (the stacking of mattresses, the drying of clothes etc). These performances keep individualization of an object floating between that of a (non)object and an (un)object, like a mirage in the desert that is always too far from reach. To some these assemblages might appear as installation, to others as discarded object, or as in-between entities that hover in an uncertainty of unformed reality, waiting to become an object.

Photographs by Vrinda Seksaria

Text by Santosh Thorat