Nasir’s work draws on what is around him, what he sees and experiences, as a person living, in a space which does not lead itself easily to simple generalizations, where it is easy to forget that justice exists or that goodwill and trust continues to exist in the daily exchanges between people, even as time hangs like a penal sentence and hope is scarce.
The beauty of the landscape is as deceptive as it is engulfing. In his childhood, Nasir saw his grandmother ignite the Lantern, go out at night, and look around the lawn to check that everything was ok. The family would retire peacefully only upon her return, after she had extinguished the light. For Nasir, carrying the lantern for the past six months in public spaces is an act guided by childhood memories of safety and well-being that grew complicated by the situation around him. The lantern mediates this conversation between two extremes, one of safety and growing dread.
Carrying a lit lantern during the day is redolent of the parable of the madman in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, who is accosted in the marketplace for doing the sameand cries – “God is Dead”. The scene invokes the landscape Nasir inhabits and the penal colony it resembles.
His performative act provokes a questioning similar to Nietzsche’s madman.
in Kashmiri language – Free admission