Sometimes I listen to the wind

During ‘Covid Lockdown days’


When I used to unfurl a flag on daily basis,


I would often sit and see how wind moves from one tree to another.

And how birds take a decision to be or not to be.

Yesterday it was windy.


On terrace, I thought of my favourite spot.


Few dead random stretcher pieces in the corner of my studio got a whiff,

Questioned me, “ Wind and Open-Sky are having a dialogue ,


What is your actual intent? ”


I felt inadequate,

though in ‘ Performance Art’ , it is often articulated:

Body accompanies you wherever you go.

Like olden golden ‘ oil-on-canvas days ’


I assembled few stretcher pieces into a frame,


as if a pre-digital lover, waiting with open arms for a tight embrace.

While I assembled the stretcher pieces,


I heard ‘the wood’ wanted to say something more.

Perhaps, the sound of the wood said:


the actual stretch of an empty frame is always

more than the final stretch of a piece of canvas .

In front of the empty frame, I looked


like a poor piece of blank canvas,


The ritual of black perforated garment


which I often use to perform ‘ The last Pheran^*’, did not suffice.

And then, when I went closer to the fame to listen more:

This is what wind is saying to the open-sky, it said.

Now, when I see the image captured with a self-timer, I see,

A togetherness of an empty frame as a musical instrument,

And myself someone who played to play a silence ?

Or, me and the empty frame:

A temporary device to capture the sound of the wind?

But when I try to recollect what wind said to me,

There is really no image, not this text even.

24-08-2022. Inder Salim

^*Pheran: the traditional outfit in Kashmir

Flag series from my terrace during Covid19 Pandemic

191 flags, video

Variable size

2019- 

The idea to make a flag on daily basis during the Pandemic was an idea to fly and be on the ground. To feel connected to the world during complete lockdown during 2019. Facebook and Instagram helped me to disseminate the images and video clips of the flags. The fabric material actually the residual waste on the terrace from my earlier performances was handy. It was almost like a daily ritual to get a flag done in the morning and then watch the wind playing with it.

I call it HARKAT, a term that attempts to alternate the term Performance Art. Not unlike Performance art, Harkat too intends to localize the nuance and context of doing an act. The “verb-to-be” is the essence of an act to become the part of that density of “thisness” which otherwise eludes us at logical levels. In nutshell, a simultaneity of participation of every sense and non-sense makes a Harkat.

At a molecular level, the lockdown time was a time when the routine got disrupted unpredictably but provided a unique opportunity to invent the act to transcend. Every “line of flight” arrives and departs with a newness of time. The new aesthetic of mind learns to accept the state of imperfection and humbles to get rid of heavy history and memory of the past. To listen to the music of the earth, it was important during the Pandemic that we dance profoundly within the folds of body….