Horizon

Interdisciplinary Art/ Vakoverschrijdend/Project atelier

Teacher and Supervisor: Marc Horemans (www.marchoremans.com), SLAC Leuven

Theme: Horizon for academy year 2018-2019

My interpretation to Horizon as follows:

 

Step 1: 18-09-2018

 

 

Step 2: 9-10-2018

 

 

Step 3: 12-12-2018 – Ratio 1: 1: words : colors

Studies with 3D accumulations & photos:

The tension between the inescapable or unavoidable:

I may have learned something about paintings in the past few years through the academic platforms.

I write texts without any training in this field but only within my feelings and limited knowledge, but I never gave much attention to my writings anyway.  You may call them ‘poems’ or not but the texts have very much influences on my paintings.

Within my creativity,  I now obviously see the link in relation of ratio’s between my writings and paintings!

As Leonardo da Vinci said “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”

I can feel and see both in my own pallet.

In this theme horizon, I am stipulated or imposed myself in a  line where my past, present and future blend together, always as nostalgia, where the images form within the words and colors as an abutment.

 

Studies:

 

Inertia/Traagheid

Interdisciplinary Art/ Vakoverschrijdend

Teacher and Supervisor: Marc Horemans (www.marchoremans.com), SLAC Leuven

In this academic year 2017-2018, we are working with Mokuhanga -Woodblock printing (Japan) in relation with our theme Inertia.

My first attemt was with Mokuhanga to make a profile of my guru Rabindranath Tagore (author, poet, painter and philosopher whose phylosophy about life stayed with me since my childhood.

The quotation here of Tagore (in Bengali) means exactly the same as Novalis (author, philosopher and poet) which I have found very interesting.

 

 

 Mokuhanga work 1- Profile-Rabindranath Tagore

 

INERTIA-STEP 2

Following the theme of Inertia, we had to make a 1 minute film without any montage.

Here is mine:

Holding on and Letting go

According to Rabindranath Tagore (in his philosophical view):

‘finiteness consists in forms, while the infinite is an idea’.

We are bounded in ‘finite’ and also in ‘infinite’ situations and if the ‘infinite’ refers to just an idea, it brings ‘inertia’ for me to holding on to.

The concept for ‘holding on and letting go’ based on this ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ dilemmas where place and time are not important or avoided with concern.

The whole idea was developed on movement (symbolic of how the way life goes on) where start and end points are not known but with an idea of expansion.

There was no slow-motion in the movement to show inertia. Following me, that is also not necessary but contrarily shows sort of unrest/stress/uncertainty.

The concern was on our daily life which is bound with dark and light moments (like in the film, sudden butterflies are passing by or the sun is shining or the clouds are taking over –without knowing or without any control).

The film is made in the same tempo and has no perspective but which implicates over the feeling of endlessness and shows an unending activity.

Light and dark play with the shadow of the person where the person is not known but yet present.

The path is chosen as free but yet fixed in direction.

Dynamism catches the absence, presence and the vanishing or disappearing moments of a situation.

 

INERTIA-STEP 3

We had to find a motive as inspiration to start with our work:

Mine is as below:

 

Motive

Contiguous, infinite,

Loose, constructive,

poly, slack, segments, arc,

rectangle, circle, spline,

within all.

It can be letters and mean something,

it can be architecture-fragile but strong

and vanishes

in its own perspectives.

Can you say what is it?

It bends, goes straight,

It can be free in its own way to its infinite.

It looks back, gives shapes

to all objects.

It holds forms of reality

as a best motive.

Can you say what is it?

It is simple in its own grace and shine

because it is just a LINE, a motive of mine.

 Mokuhanga work-2- Lines which take us to a distance

INERTIA-STEP 4

Further with :

Holding on and letting go

An idea can slip away like a bird
in any moment,
holding on to it is the main game.
My hands cannot catch it because
the idea vanishes always through my fingers to its infinite.

An idea which we cannot catch anyway
by our hands!
But hands like words tell the stories
of us as reflections in the mirrors.

Hands, their hands young with future,
danced in the light with mehndi on.

Hands, his hands were aged
where knowledge, wisdom, pain
made marks of time,

the time which got away as past
and which over I do not know much
Knowing or not knowing merge than
in my limited capability
make me paralyzed in a way.
Dynamism catches my thoughts
but I stand still.
Absence or presence,
vanishing or disappearing,

a moment of a situation
which originated long ago
but still trying to hang-on
in the memories of my shadows.
Shadows of my nostalgia
grave deep roots to my unavoidable inertia.

 

INERTIA-STEP 5

PITCH

“Shadows of my nostalgia as inertia: living in another country, in a different culture,
the most important thing is to merge with its own language, culture, clothing and habits.
My own language, family members, clothing style, kind of plants and flowers disappeared in my shadows of thoughts where inertia arises with its own pace.
My intention is to bring back some memories in my work to reflect my moments of inertia. “

 INERTIA-STEP 6

Idea to work further with paintings:

I always take photos of shadows which has a direct link with my own feelings of inertia. So, I plan to make a series of paintings where shadows will be the main theme. Some examples are as follows:

   

   

Idea to work further with Mokuhanga:

I will try to bring some patterns of saris on wood printing which my mother used to wear and write some parts of the favorite Bengali poems which my father liked the most. Those are the memories which hang certainly within my soul and stay deep down as my inertia.

INERTIA-STEP  7

PITCH- চূড়ান্ত/final/finaal

উপস্থিতি, অনুপস্থিতি, ফিরে আসা অথবা অদৃশ্য,

একটি মুহূর্ত অথবা পরিস্থিতি

যা দীর্ঘ আগে উৎপত্তি,

এখন আমার ছায়া শুধু

যেন  আমার  নিষ্ক্রিয়তা

গভীর অসীম  অনিবার্য !

 

Absence or presence, vanishing or coming back, a moment of a situation which originated long ago and stays as infinite in the memories of my shadows.

Shadows of my nostalgia grave deep roots to my unavoidable inertia.

 

Afwezigheid of aanwezigheid, verdwijnen of terugkomen, een moment van een situatie die lang geleden ontstond en als oneindig blijft hangen in de herinneringen aan mijn schaduw(en).

Schaduw(en) van mijn nostalgie graven diepe wortels in mijn onvermijdelijke traagheid.

 

 

 

 

A bit more insight of CHAOS before entering to INERTIA

CHAOS was the theme for the last academic year 2016-2017. Theme INERTIA is in its start point for the academic year 2017-2018.

The past is not easy to let go of and also not always necessary. Here are some memories/few photos of the joint project with  Sylvia Wenmackers  (thanks to the Pilot1-project, I have made the acquaintances with such brilliant scientist like Sylvia www.sylviawenmackers.be/blog ).

 

PIGEON-HOLING and few photos of the exhibition in STUK, Leuven, July 2017:

This object has been created by a duo: architect and artist Shuktara Momtaz (SLAC) and physicist and philosopher Sylvia Wenmackers (KU Leuven).

This object embodies the thought “Despite the chaos around me, I live fine.”
This serene attitude is symbolized here by the blue interior of the object. Since the individual can change little about the surrounding world, the exterior has been kept unaltered.
While chaos is usually experienced as negative on the emotional level, the concept plays a positive role for physicists: it helps to explain how deterministic systems can be unpredictable in practice.
People categorize each other, often based on external characteristics. When this pigeon-holing is coupled to judgments, it casts shadows over our lives. In addition, similar processes are repeated at different levels: from individual contacts to institutions.
This scale-independence is presented in the sides of the cube. These patterns arise by repeating the same rule (‘remove the middle of a square’) at ever smaller scales. If it would be repeated into infinity, a fractal emerges: a geometric figure, closely connected to the concept chaos (text published in the brochure and website https://pilotleuven.wordpress.com/portfolio/hokjesdenken/ of Pilot1 project, 2017).

.

Sylvia Wenmackers who introduced me to fractals

Further with CHAOS:

Sylvia Wenmackers who introduced me to fractals:

My teammate is Professor Sylvia Wenmackers of Pilot1 project -SLAC+KULeuven-(art+science) as she posted earlier in her blog.

She presented an article at our first symposium where the artists and scientists came together for the first time in relation with this project.
Sylvia had no intension to be a part of this project because she is already overloaded with her academic profession and of being a mother.
While she presented her award winning paper ‘Look-at-that’ , I was very much impressed and decided to request her to be my teammate. Luckily, Sylvia agreed.

While I was a bit lost and had conflicts of presenting outside the boundary of my comfort zone like canvas and oil-paints. Thinking about presenting on another media, I was not sure on wood panels, mdf panels or on fabrics, she gave the idea like an angel – “Why not on the fractal panels”?

Fractals? What are those? So, I started to read about them and believe me, I became a fan because they are extremely interesting in terms of science, art and nature.

A glimpse on fractals:

The word fractal comes from the Latin for “broken”(Peterson & Henderson, 1999).
fractals

http://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-is-chaos-theory/

‘A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole’.
http://www.inminds.co.uk/fractal.html

In short a fractal is a never-ending pattern or process.

The history of fractals is a path from theoretical studies to modern applications of computer graphics. The first definition of the function with a graph of fractal was presented by Karl Weierstrass, a German mathematician in 1872.
Through time and through various scientists, different types of fractal forms are recognized, like Koch snowflake, Julia set, strange attractor, Sierpinski carpet etc.

More about fractals : Sylvia’s Blog.

Fractals and Chaos of mine:

Fractal dimensions have an important role to characterizing chaotic phenomena. Chaos is present within fractals even if you can find order and symmetry, complexity versus simplicity within it.

The negativity around me in society like discrimination against gender and color are always present. We think the world is civilized, but it is not. Such negativity is present in every scale in our world like fractals no matter how big or how small they are.

Chaos, but I live fine is my ultimate declaration against all negativity which Sylvia appreciated.

So, presenting such a complex subject through fractals suited both of our interests in terms of art and science.

For the first time, I saw a direct link of my situation to present it via a 3D form instead of presenting it in 2D paintings. A box which makes the outside and inside separated but yet together as the world outside, which is chaotic, but inside it is possible to live fine.

Sylvia took the challenge to make a 3D version from 2D panels. She designed and prepared the file for the laser cutter and went to FabLab (Fablab site) in Leuven. She cut 6 panels separately and than brought them together as a 3D form which she succeeded in.

The way to paint:

When I got the sample from Sylvia, means our little cute box of 30x30cm,  I tried various methods of painting techniques. I wanted to play with color, means the tones of the colors.

foto5  foto7

I studied the following painters and the Maxican architect Luis-Barragan :

-Mark Rothco

-Barnett Newman

-Blurry Mondrians

-Pieter Vermeersch

-Willy de Sauter

-Soll Le Witt (100 cubes)

Thanks to  Wannes Lecompte, for his valuable suggestions and ideas.

We can hardly change the world, so I will keep the outside of the box untouched. I am only going to paint the inner side of the box, which Sylvia agreed to, with each panel with a separate tone of blue resembling to ‘ chaos, but I live fine’.

foto6  foto2

More about Sylvia’s design and work click here.

Interdisciplinary Art/ Vakoverschrijdend

Further with Chaos:

Following Marc, chaos has to define in one sentence and we should start thinking our ‘own chaos’ as image.

Trial of mine as below:

But, despite chaos I live fine!

Here-‘I live fine’ is my start point to do or create something about chaos. Because, in this world, everything twists around your own-self.

If you don’t live fine, than life has no meaning. If you close your eyes, than first comes the darkness. If you die, than everything goes way, nothing matters anymore. Whatever the world does to me, it is me who should show the strength and creativity to fight against all odds or chaos.

I took two paintings of mine as base points which I painted in 2013 in the name of ‘here and there’.
Chaos is present in these existing paintings. I took these paintings as background images and build layers on it in Photoshop to show that ‘I live fine’ even on several layers of chaos.
(But these images are just suggestive to hold-on something for the moment.)

So, chaos in 'one sentence' became:

Despite chaos, I live fine!

butterfly-effect

Interdisciplinary Art/ Vakoverschrijdend

Interdisciplinary Art/ Vakoverschrijdend

SLAC+KU Leuven

Academic year 2016-2017

"What is Art?
It is the response of man's creative soul
to the call of the Real".

Rabindranath Tagore

Project: SLAC+KU Leuven

Teacher and Supervisor: Marc Horemans (www.marchoremans.com), SLAC Leuven

Introduction:

Art and science can complement each other. Under this motto, the academic year 2016-2017 is going to start a collaboration between the visual art departments at SLAC (Leuven Academy and Conservatory) and KU Leuven.

The project runs under the name of a pilot project, because it is a process in which the (self) control, the experiment / test, the bridges between two worlds, in addition to the final crystallization in a work of art, be an end in itself.

For the first edition, (PiLoT1) was chosen as the theme "Chaos". The artists from this workshop will be inspired by and in collaboration with scientists around "Chaos" within their own discipline.

More information at: https://set.kuleuven.be/nieuws/2016/pilot1

Theme : Chaos (academy year 2016-2017)

A glimpse:

We live in a world where chaos presents in every order and system. We know chaos as 'a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization or order'. (source)

The English word chaos is borrowed from the Greek word abyss. In ancient Greece, chaos was originally thought of as the abyss or emptiness that existed before things came into being. (source)

 So, when chaos first entered into English in the 1400s, it referred to the inverse of confusion but referred to a void.

According to Publius Ovidius Naso (born in 43 BCE in Rome) who was a great poet and thinker who thought of chaos as not a formless void from which all things were made, but as a formless, jumbled, disorganized mass. English speakers than borrowed this meaning of chaos which denotes utter confusion, disorganization and unpredictable behavior.

In the scientific realm this unpredictable behavior is not necessarily undesirable. The scientific meaning of chaos can be summed up in the following statement:

"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit." (source)

butterfly-effect

A plot of the Lorenz attractor

Chaos theory is the field of study in Mathematics that studies the behavior of Dynamical system that are highly sensitive to initial conditions—a response popularly referred to as the "Butterfly effect".

For scientists it's the "Butterfly Effect" where one small change makes an immense difference. It also makes the future of a chaotic system implausible to predict.

Chaos itself has its many forms and its effects varies also to person to person.

In this task we actually try to find out what chaos means to us and how we give it a form in our own creative domains.

My own interpretation:

The first aspect:

I see myself situated in this world in a chaotic manner, means I stand between two big B’s which means Bangladesh and Belgium. It is the experience and the memories which I always carry with me from my past. By living in Belgium I adopted with the systems and rules overhear. When I memorize something about my parents or listen to music from there, for example; Tagore songs, I than feel the way how they listened to those. I have a feeling in my psychic being that I am hanging as a pendulum from my roots and have the butterfly effect just the way scientists explains like the 3 principles which chaos embodies:

-extreme sensitivity to initial conditions

-cause and effect are not proportional

-nonlinearity

My memories, feelings or thoughts never follow the same path but come back in a different manner as scientists explains "Starting the pendulum from a slightly different initial condition would result in a completely different trajectory." My memories and my feelings always differ in that manner.

I don't know if the human brain or the human feelings can be complementary with a pendulum. That would be my question to the scientists.

The second aspect:

The second aspect is my surroundings. Like everyone, I am in stress and have lots in my head but yet I try to follow plans and orders and become organized. If I become chaotic for some reason than it is because of my surroundings and its causes and effects.

In link with my surroundings I see chaos as follows:

Chaos

What is trying to blur my intuition and view?
An opposite impulse but what is it?
Is it an understandable fact?
No-it is not that.

I cannot free myself from both worlds which I have.
But at last I fixed myself in my self- made fence!

The racism itself is blend within in its own stake
as cruel with its ugly sharp nails.
What people do to each other
have a great impact and influence.
They always let me feel that I am not equal.

The color of mine is never appreciated here.
The gender of mine is never appreciated there.
What an unworthy, shameful, repulsive, inferior world.

But I live fine.

Creativity rambles around me with all its colors
but I cannot catch.
Is that not enough and just adequate?

Try to breath but I cannot
Is it my self-made chaos?
No-I don’t think,
it is the surroundings,
which take it all with its own severe pic.

Shuktara