Endless Game

Heavy earth and lighter sky
Golden birds or broken planes
Icarus never died

Dominique Jacques posed questions and changed the rules in her recent exhibition ‘Endless Game’. We’re used to visiting a gallery to see an art work with a little caption and then we are left to appraise it. Whilst this was a part of Dominique’s work, there were unexpected additional dimensions.

‘Amulet’for instance had 103 poetic lines (a few interspersing this review) which were beautifully written to accompany 103 pieces of art that were gifts for anyone who could recite some of the poetic lines. As I mused over which poetic lines best caught my mood, two little girls turned up in the gallery to pick up their piece, each a small work of art that Dominique had picked up in nature and then added to.

Please don’t disturb the trees dreaming
Don’t wake up the divine beings
Busy with immortality.

There was also a basketball hoop with four basketballs in mid-air, titled ‘Kurukshetra’, which was based on an Angor Wat bas relief depicting the famous battle.

There were three archery themed pieces with arrows in varying degrees of accuracy, from bull’s eye to further out. What after all is perfection? it seemed to imply.

Some pieces were games in mid flow, like the one of crabs and oyster shells, but reversing the ‘winner takes all culture’by creating a ‘harmonious universe where the opposition is purely aesthetic.’ Another game was titled ‘Field of experience’, retracing the human life journey which is ‘Full of surprises, awareness, choices and opportunities for change.’

Some residents describe Auroville and our life here as a ‘lila’ (Sanskrit for ‘play’). As Dominique writes in her introduction to the exhibition ‘Are we just pawns during our passage on earth? Is the game rigged, or do we have the power to push back the limits and change the rules?’ This mythic world is alluded to further. ‘The game’s space is also one of dreams, it’s the realm of our imagination, of which we are still the lords, where we let in whatever enchants us most, where haunting memories sometimes visit us. Children, precarious magicians and relentless dreamers still have access to spaces to which we have lost the key’.

Higher than the mountains
Deeper than the sea
A new child plays on the ground

Another technique Dominique used was deliberately unfocussed shots, allowing something new ‘to enter the field of sensation and perception’, hinting at other possibilities.

These are not easy days for Auroville, but the exhibition gave a few clues as to possible ways of working with the current state of play (so to speak). Accompanying one image of a boy curled up, were the words: ‘Like in an outsized comic strip, different children uncomfortable with their environment retreat into the dream world to escape the oppressive reality that surrounds them’. Whilst this could be interpreted as escapism, it could also hold the possibility of finding inner creative direction in the midst of turmoil.

The exhibition was a welcome in-breath, allowing the unexpected and the new, and nudging us deeper into our inner creative and playful worlds. And there were signs of hope.

As Kali Yuga falls apart
Sowing its iron gears
A new age of light emerging