The Sacred and the Profane:

“To be an artist, to live out a commitment to art, does this not also mean to be a practicing believer, a monk, to operate with the goal of giving new meaning to one’s own life and those of others? Does art know the answer to the question?”

Above is an excerpt from a quote (by an anonymous writer) printed on the announcement card of Amna Ilyas’s exhibition, Immediacy, displayed at Rohtas 2, Lahore, from 8^th to 19^th May 2012.

                  This absolute human pursuit to bring oneself in harmony with a “higher power/divine being” in order to achieve a higher level of consciousness, greater self-awareness through a discipline of silent contemplation, has been an inward struggle for man since the dawn of civilizations and for all Art in general. Some seek that comfort and consolation/solace in religion, while others devout themselves to other forms of spirituality. Believers and non-believers alike, are influenced by the concept of this ‘divine’ being, not as a philosophical conception apart from the everyday life, but as an experience that occurs in the midst of the everyday. Many artists through their art have tried to capture/represent the feeling of transcendence and the sublime, speaking of the divine through the language of art, but if I may take the liberty to speak of art as a noun then; art itself may be the ‘absolute’ (not as a blasphemous concept but in theory one can find exact parallels in the psychology of art and any belief system) since it demands a certain sense of unquestionable devotion/submission. In which, the slightest bit of doubt can cease spiritual excellence.

            Displayed in the darkened gallery, were two cubicles (approximately 6’ x 6’). One of them glowing and translucent; made of acrylic, covered with a pale sticker sheet on the inside, with long and narrow wound like scrapings that emit bright light that is enclosed inside, on the top of the structure was sitting a smoke machine, ejecting fog that smelled slightly burnt - the other; dark and opaque, made of plywood perhaps. Upon ‘circumambulating’ the spaces, the viewer realizes that the latter is enterable through a door on the back, going inside which, defies all sense of space. It feels much bigger on the inside, since you can’t see anything, as compared to the outside where you can make out some sense of its scale because of the light that emits from the other cubicle. The contradiction between the two spaces is that of ‘void’ and ‘mass’ perhaps, and instills in us, if only for an instant, the deepest possible kind of doubt about the object and our unconscious confidence in know-ability, faith, and logic. These philosophically charged geometrical spaces perhaps didn’t need such an overt statement that is printed on the invite. Wittgenstein was aware of this, "We should not try to communicate the incommunicable", he wrote, "That will be futile.  That which is unsaid in what we have said will manifest itself by its silence."

Immediacy, I feel, is a transitory moment of Ilyas’s self-reflection. Perhaps the viewer needed to be left in the realm of ‘pure’ experience, alone, for their moment of self-reflection.