ananta
In the video installation, Ananta, the object of the mirror facilitates a transgressive desire to go beyond ones’ own surface or exterior, through the fluid extension and expansion of the body.
In the story of Pandora’s Box; Pandora’s action is one of contraction – a literal looking in - to the forbidden space of her own body, (metaphorically represented by a box). In each instance, both gestures can be seen as a direct embodiment of the desire to know rather than the desire to see - an ‘epistemophilia’.
Ananta, presents us with a situation where we witness the subject (or ego’s) image being projected back to the subject (or ego) -through the doubling of their own bodily symmetry. This new body, born from the other in the symmetry of the mirror, takes on the qualities of the ‘monstrous’- invoking images of Darwinian teratologies, like that of a Siamese twin or a deformed animal. A kind of turbulent bodily morphology replaces an image of the body as a stable ‘whole’. Though disconcerting, perhaps these images of the body in perpetual change offer a more realistic picture of our own corporeal existence; in processes of disease, pregnancy, ageing and death.
Ananta - Video Installation, Victorian College of the Arts, 2012