multiplicity

About

Georg Simmel explains in his seminal text, The Metropolis and Mental Life, that man's mind ‘is stimulated by the difference between a momentary impression and the one which preceded it'. One of the distinguishing features of the metropolis according to Simmel is that it confronts us with a multiplicity of rapidly changing images, resulting in the intensification of nervous stimulation. For the exhibition, multiplicity, Kaz presents works using multiple images, often through fragmentation and superimposition, as a way of conveying our experiences in the urban environment as described by Simmel. In the installation, No Single Point of Focus, a video image of night-time Tokyo, shot from a moving train, is projected onto a wall as well as onto a rotating mirror ball. The resulting visual effect is of fragmented images moving across the walls of the exhibition space and overlapping with the single intact image on a wall. As Time Passes By, a single monitor video work, superimposes multiple videos of various rickshaw trips made in the southern Indian city of Pune to create a cacophony of sound and images. The chaotic visual experience involved in negotiating the urban space is taken to the extreme in these works, subjecting the viewer to visual overload with the aim of overwhelming everyday consciousness to tip it into an experience of the sublime. Here, the dualism between ‘self' and ‘other' is obliterated along with the sense of time and space, to create a sense of oneness and timelessness. The works exhibited in multiplicity continue Kaz's exploration of the possibility of a non-dualistic way of relating to the world. He explores the possibility of the non-division of subject and object, questioning what happens to us, physically and intellectually, in such a state.