In the exhibition Only Life, Myriad Places (until December 9, 2023) at Dubai’s Ishara Art Foundation, the artist Sudarshan Shetty considers the retelling of stories as they are passed on across various cultures and through generations across sculpture, installation, moving image and photographs. The artist explores dreams, illusion and reality through the space between states of wakefulness, where the relationship between the three is less defined. In referencing a multitude of religious and philosophical texts, Shetty considers the passage of stories, between oral traditions and the museum, where objects gain different meanings across time.

In a video conversation with STIR, when asked about what drives and inspires him, Shetty elaborated saying, "In most of my work, I am playing out this theatre of bringing something back to life while very well knowing that it's not possible and that it must acquire another life. Even if it did acquire another life, there's a departure from its source in terms of its meaning. It’s creating a mirror reflection without the use of a mirror, and I am interested in how the reflection can be real, as much as it is unreal.”

In his new short film One Life Many (2022), Shetty brings to life a story that has traversed different cultures and wonders about the power of the tale as it continues to live on. Referencing ancient Indic literature, Shetty reconstitutes the story of Narada, a travelling sage and musician, being sent to earth as a curse by Brahma, his father, to lead another life and he is to take the form of a woman. Retold and expanded upon through Shetty’s film, the story contrasts one man's solitary life with the life of a vibrant market. A man walks through an abandoned market and reaches an older man who tells him the story of a desolate city. Within the story, there is another folk tale of the fox and the chickens. The chicks are left by their mother for a while at which time the fox imitates her call so the chicks let down their guard. The characters in the film cannot recall how the story ends and reach the very same point in the premise. We see the same man lower himself into the sea from where a woman emerges.

A woman, on the other hand, experiences a busy, multicultural market that is full of life. She repeats the same story as the man who traversed a desolate city, only to be disturbed by a white van that she contemplates may be full of dead bodies with nowhere to bury or burn them. She also narrates the story of the day before her birth, when all the members of her household experienced the same dream. Were they in each other’s dreams or was it a shared consciousness?

Over the course of the conversation, Shetty talks about an interest in the notion of time within this story, where the man submerges himself and a woman emerges to continue her own life that is independent of his and vice-versa, positing an interesting consideration of time and how we conceive of it. Referring to the idea of non-dualism in Advaita philosophy, the artist talks about simultaneous presence, absence and mortal separation and individualism that shrouds collective consciousness.  

Shetty also presents sculptures of earthen pots in wood and metal that form mirror images of each other. When asked to elaborate on the gestures he is interested in creating these artefacts, Shetty tells STIR, “In terms of the vessel, I got interested in the terracotta pot and the idea of ritual and where it comes from. I don’t necessarily believe in their religious implications, but I believe that it must come from reliving, this idea of retelling is also part of that, how we want to tell the same stories, and this idea of repetition of similar rituals.” He also talks about the significance of the symbols behind ritual practices, especially death rituals where the matka or earthen pot represents the body and the water being poured as the life spent in that body returning to its source, the earth. He questions how these symbolic gestures have come to be and their implication on how we understand life. For example, is there a distinction between the body and the life spent within it? This is something that he explores through One Life Many as well, considering the existence of multiple selves within one.

Rituals as a practice within religious and social contexts provide us with a link to previous generations, a kind of literacy in time through knowledge that is passed on. The artist talks about the crucial nature of these gestural performances as a way to understand existence to a greater extent. Shetty speaks about Vedic rituals and Hindustani classical music and their mode of institutionalising knowledge, where the texts and music have remained distinctively similar with only minor variation over thousands of years, always harkening back to the story. However, he also speaks about the need to make a craft your own and how one brings in their own voice to take forward classical traditions. Speaking to the context of the exhibition within the Western conception of the museum, Shetty tells STIR that objects can have their own lives within the institutional context as well, instead of presenting a static glimpse into history.

Carved wooden utensils mirror the found vessels in the show. The vessels were rescued by the artist from a metal workshop where a large collection of brass utensils was being prepared for melting down. A few of these utensils were salvaged by the artist, which he then replicated in wood and displayed the two sets in an emulation of a mirror reflection. Each bears the impression of being knocked down, which would take place to make the melting process easier. When asked about his interest in reconstituting objects through reclaimed wood, Shetty says: "This act [of salvaging the pots] itself was like rescuing my past, to be able to understand things for myself. I take wood and I carve it in its mirror reflection with wood, it’s exactly the same. And the reflection is achieved without using the mirror. Even that is real, even this is real, and that becomes the object in the museum space. And that these redundant objects acquire a certain kind of meaning when they are inside a museum space is something that interests me a lot. How can you give it another life while knowing that it’s not possible to do?”