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We don't end at our edges show - By, Srajana Kaikini The Power of Paper John Locke famously talked about the idea of a tabula rasa – a blank slate, a sheet of paper erased of all marks, a space devoid of anything prior, a mind without any traces of the world. In short, a space that only ventures into the future and is full of possibilities. Presuming that the future is all that we can direct ourselves towards, the question of temporality is slowly fading. In a technocratic world moving fast towards singularity and enchanted in the global race to the future, Ravikumar Kashi’s arts practice has come to play a critical role. Very simply, Kashi perforates this idea of singularity through his experiments with paper. Paper, a thing that historically marked the start of human civilisation, is literally flat. Used in so many ways, the flatness of paper is rather deceiving. When in front of one, we are almost always tempted to either do something on and around it, but when presented with the idea of doing something to it, only post-facto acts of cutting, gluing, folding come to mind. Paper appears fragile. Ravikumar Kashi will tell you otherwise. During my visits to Ravi’s studio, paper is everywhere, but also present in unexpected forms. “Paper is the most tenacious material there is …” Ravi goes on to show me the different kinds of paper that can be made from various plant fibres, each fibre lending the paper a distinct texture, strength and life. What is most fascinating is the close relationship that paper has to life and decay. I stand there and wonder about how much of technology emerged not just from paper, but for paper. In the same moment that paper emerged as the mode of circulation of thought in this world, also emerged the desire to preserve it – not so distant from the ideas of birth, death and the afterlife. A certain purposeful way of thinking of this world is owed to this simple material i.e. paper. What was written on it, became the ultimate word of truth, eternal and binding. Without the written text, legality and all ideas of worldly legislation would not occur. Without the written text, the idea of a mistake or an error would perhaps be unknown. Language as Event The history of errors perhaps owes a great deal to paper. This same idea of the error appears in the work of thinkers, philosophers and poets, as the marker of a certain human condition. Postmodernist thinker Jacques Derrida, in talking about the trace of the erased text, bases his entire theory of de-construction in Of Grammatology (1967), on this act of writing, its erasure and the traces it leaves behind. “One says ‘language’ for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity […] we say ‘writing’ for all that and more […] for all that gives rise to an inscription in general […] cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing’.” Jean Luc Nancy, in his work Corpus (2008), writes about the page as a ‘touching’ of various beings. “The page is a touching, of my hand while it writes and your hands while they hold the book. This touch is infinitely indirect, deferred, but it continues as a slight, resistant, fine texture, the infinitesimal dust of a contact everywhere interrupted and pursued. In the end, here and now, your own gaze touches the same traces of characters as mine and you read me and I write you.” Writing, for artists, poets, philosophers, does not mimic the world, but is constitutive of new worlds. The way in which the act of writing itself is generative as well as resistive, is at the heart of this exhibition of nine pieces, drawn from a larger body of works, which were made between June 2023 and now. These works tremble in the light of the world, barely making themselves seen or heard, but persist, making themselves available to a whisper or a wisp of breath, ready to crumble if any power prevails. A few minutes into conversation with Ravi, one finds his vocabulary infused with ideas emerging entirely from a mind that knows paper inside out. Tensility, porosity, transparency, opacity, folding, creasing, tearing, stretching, layering and covering. However, these ideas don’t just belong to the world of paper. If you dwell on them, they are ideas that percolate into our world and the various ways in which we encounter it. The ideas of opacity and porosity which are very close to the artist’s way of working through his material in these works, hold a very prominent place amongst debates in the world on systems of knowledge-making and their dissemination. In recent times, the right to opacity has been claimed by thinkers of decolonial and feminist traditions, like Édouard Glissant, to suggest that subjects have agency in making themselves known or not, to the other. This is an important consideration in a data-hungry time. To be not always very easily read or interpreted, is an idea discussed by many thinkers. Susan Sontag famously argued for a way of engaging with art without interpreting it. In continental thinkers, the philosophy of unconcealment relies on the idea of the veil or the layer that conceals, and the ways in which something may then emerge or be unconcealed in experience and thought. In Sanskrit poetics, the theory of dhvani suggests that poems work best through the idea of suggestion – where the intended meaning is not the literal one, but perhaps secondary or tertiary, and can be unpacked with some attention not just to the content but also to the form. The Sangam poets were well known to employ dhvani aesthetics through high symbolism, where nature was deployed as a metaphor for states of mind, and elements like fruits, flowers, trees, almost always represented a human act, emotion or intention. In all these instances, one can see traces of play between the opaque and the transparent language. Against the backdrop of these aesthetic devices, the right to opacity becomes a powerful political device, one may say, to dismantle the convenient structures of ‘content-creation’ that is all-pervasive in our contemporary context. What content can light create? What form can words create? As if on a flight of imagination, Ravikumar Kashi’s latest works hold in them the quality of a magnum opus – a lyrical ode to one who is content without content (pun intended). What appears before us are forms, moments in time and space, generated from his nozzle-brush – paper rematerialised to the consistency of a kind of pulpy paint – narrating or rather overflowing with language – words, phrases, sentences from various influences and references in Kannada. Each of these forms appear like ‘speech-acts’. The speech-act in literary theory is that act which is self-contained in its utterance – one utters, and one stutters, and the said deed is considered done. The speech-act ascribes a very distinct materiality to language. Language – words, utterances, phrases, sentences, are no longer precursors to the world or its translation, but become the event of the world itself. Words are, as if thrust into action. There is no more meaning-making involved in this act. The meaning is in the act. Language and the ways it is marked have always assumed surfaces. You say something to break deeper, to hide or show, to make something visible or invisible. You either say or write too much or you write too little. Some things are ‘TMI’ (Too Much Information). Some things are ‘For Your Eyes Only’. Ironically, in Ravikumar Kashi’s world, the surfaces of paper, themselves magically transform into words – form becomes content, and vice versa. It is a moment of philosophical singularity. By doing away with the two-dimensional foreground and background as a default setting in language, the artist’s words are generated in time and space, almost in the spirit of flux or a stream of consciousness. Words are given form by his pulp paint and made available to us primordially as crystallisations of this process of tapping in and out of the subconscious. It is very difficult, thereby, to mediate these works, let alone present them. After all, how does one present a sigh or a scream? And yet, that is the task that Ravikumar has so skillfully attempted. This event of utterance could manifest in a whisper or a sigh, a soliloquy or a scream, an inconsolable sob or a euphoric dream let loose. This eventfulness is contingent and is always flirting with the idea of meaning, but never submitting to it. To put it simply, language thrives outside of singularity. In a time pervaded by coded algorithms and large language models (LLMs), Kashi’s triumph lies in imagining ways of subverting the code, resisting absolute meaning and thinking of language’s existence outside in the world, embodied. The Artist and His Material: Ideas in Freefall Polyvalent and present, Kashi’s works form a culmination of a long-standing relationship that the artist has had with the materiality of paper and its tussle with the ideal world. Acclaimed widely for his book-objects, as well as installation works using paper pulp as his core material, Ravikumar says that if there is anything he values the most in his studio, it would be his innumerable idea notebooks. Contrary to assumptions, given his immersion into material processes, the artist is firmly committed to the world of ideas. Enter his numerous idea books, and one finds fleeting ideas, thoughts, diagrams, drawings and quotes. These notebooks are the site of the origin of several of his works. Deeply influenced by philosophical ideas of circularity, the cycle of life and death, permanence and impermanence, his notebooks are strewn with diagrams that pertain to sacred symbols in Buddhist thought. The book, for instance, is a critical concept for Ravikumar Kashi, whose book-objects have been exhibited widely across the world. Therefore it is only natural that he has turned his attention to the units of a book, namely the page. The artist’s painted sentences, when on the page, part ways to allow for something new to occur in the mind of the viewer, just like the idea of sphota, as suggested by Bhartrhari, which refers to that explosion of sense that takes place at the end of a sentence in linguistic structure. Ravikumar Kashi has travelled extensively across the globe, searching for different techniques, formulae and methods to develop paper into a versatile material to work with. He studied handmade papermaking in 2001 under J Parry, at the Papermaking Resource, Glasgow School of Art, in Glasgow, UK, with a Charles Wallace India Trust grant. In 2009, he went on to learn the art of hanji, traditional Korean papermaking from Jang Yong Hoon and Seong-woo at Jang Ji Bang, South Korea, supported by InKo Centre, Chennai. These deep engagements with the craft of papermaking became the basis for much of his works, later. Over the years, he has visited and interacted with papermakers in various papermaking units in Bangalore, Sanganer-Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Pondicherry, Sikkim, Nepal and Mexico, trying to understand best practices in different traditions of the art of papermaking. The artist now holds a keen desire to visit Egypt, to learn more about papyrus making, and hopes to explore Japanese traditions of paper as well as learn from Kashmiri papier-mâché craftsmanship. A teacher to design and architecture students for over two decades, he is quick to observe the pragmatic dimensions of artistic practice, trying to connect everyday ideas, experiences and objects, and magically re-imagining them through his nozzle-brush. The nozzle also paints flat paper strokes, thus becoming qualitatively more aligned to the act of painting than sculpting, and yet counters the flatness assumed and associated with the aesthetic of painting. Experimenting with circular forms, he allows the ‘natural’ to seep into his works in various subtle ways. The ‘natural’ nature of his works is not intended through qualities, but arrives as an outcome of the artist’s fidelity to his process. He foremost always wants to take the time and understand his material. Thereafter, an idea that was born in his notebook lends itself to the flows and throws of his material. There is a tenacity that Kashi displays with his ideas, just like his paper. When one takes a look at his oeuvre of work over the years, it is evident that Ravikumar Kashi has emerged as a persistent and diligent artist of our times. Deeply truthful to his own life experiences, he has not just been innovative in his explorations with materiality and symbolism, but has also been committed to giving expression to his deeply personal experiences of loss, desire, kinship, his brushes with the politics of everyday, the metaphorical and the literal, in ways that transcend the binary of the private and public. In the presence of these recent works of his, our thoughts begin to dance, either tethered to the end of a fragile letter, or soaked from incessant repetition, or simply flowing like a waterfall, as if the mind has reached a final freefall. Bio of the Author: Srajana Kaikini (PhD) is a philosopher, curator and artist interested in metaphysics, aesthetics, curatorial studies, arts pedagogy, kinship and relations, and the philosophy of language. Her research and writing has been published in journals like Voices in Bioethics, Journal of Sociology, The Deleuze Studies: India Special Issue, Kunstlicht Tijdschrift, Critical Collective et al. Her book of poems, The Night the Writing Fell Silent, in response to works by Jogen Chowdhury was released in 2023. She teaches at SIAS, Krea University and is based between Bangalore, Mumbai and Chennai. About Ravikumar Kashi: Ravikumar Kashi (b. 1968) is an artist, writer and educator whose practice revolves around exploring the mechanics of meaning-making. He holds a BFA in Painting from the College of Fine Arts, Bengaluru, an MFA in Printmaking from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Vadodara and a Master’s in English Literature from the University of Mysuru. In 2001, he received the Charles Wallace India Trust Grant, which enabled him to study handmade papermaking under artist and printmaker J Parry, at the Glasgow School of Art. In 2009, he furthered his engagement with the medium, during a three-week hanji papermaking residency in Jang Ji Bang, South Korea, supported by the InKo Centre, Chennai. Since then, paper has become central to his artistic practice, incorporating handmade papers made from diverse fibres such as cotton, banana, hanji and Daphne. Kashi has presented his work in solo exhibitions at Gallery Sumukha (Bengaluru), Pundole Art Gallery (Mumbai) and Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi), as well as internationally at the Glasgow School of Art, Air Gallery (London), Aicon Gallery (Palo Alto) and at exhibitions in Shanghai and Belforte del Chienti (Italy). His works have also been featured in museum exhibitions, curated showcases, group shows and art fairs across India and internationally. Over the years, he has received several awards recognising his contributions to contemporary art. In addition to his visual practice, Ravikumar Kashi is a prolific writer. He has authored several books and columns and lectures extensively on visual art and culture in both Kannada and English. His book on art in Kannada, Kannele, was awarded the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award in 2015. He teaches at an architecture college in the city of Bengaluru, where he continues to live and work.

We don't end at our edges show

- By, Srajana Kaikini

The Power of Paper

John Locke famously talked about the idea of a tabula rasa – a blank slate, a sheet of paper erased of all marks, a space devoid of anything prior, a mind without any traces of the world. In short, a space that only ventures into the future and is full of possibilities. Presuming that the future is all that we can direct ourselves towards, the question of temporality is slowly fading. In a technocratic world moving fast towards singularity and enchanted in the global race to the future, Ravikumar Kashi’s arts practice has come to play a critical role. Very simply, Kashi perforates this idea of singularity through his experiments with paper.

Paper, a thing that historically marked the start of human civilisation, is literally flat. Used in so many ways, the flatness of paper is rather deceiving. When in front of one, we are almost always tempted to either do something on and around it, but when presented with the idea of doing something to it, only post-facto acts of cutting, gluing, folding come to mind. Paper appears fragile. Ravikumar Kashi will tell you otherwise. During my visits to Ravi’s studio, paper is everywhere, but also present in unexpected forms. “Paper is the most tenacious material there is …” Ravi goes on to show me the different kinds of paper that can be made from various plant fibres, each fibre lending the paper a distinct texture, strength and life. What is most fascinating is the close relationship that paper has to life and decay. I stand there and wonder about how much of technology emerged not just from paper, but for paper. In the same moment that paper emerged as the mode of circulation of thought in this world, also emerged the desire to preserve it – not so distant from the ideas of birth, death and the afterlife. A certain purposeful way of thinking of this world is owed to this simple material i.e. paper.

What was written on it, became the ultimate word of truth, eternal and binding. Without the written text, legality and all ideas of worldly legislation would not occur. Without the written text, the idea of a mistake or an error would perhaps be unknown.

Language as Event

The history of errors perhaps owes a great deal to paper. This same idea of the error appears in the work of thinkers, philosophers and poets, as the marker of a certain human condition. Postmodernist thinker Jacques Derrida, in talking about the trace of the erased text, bases his entire theory of de-construction in Of Grammatology (1967), on this act of writing, its erasure and the traces it leaves behind.

“One says ‘language’ for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity […] we say ‘writing’ for all that and more […] for all that gives rise to an inscription in general […] cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing’.” Jean Luc Nancy, in his work Corpus (2008), writes about the page as a ‘touching’ of various beings.

“The page is a touching, of my hand while it writes and your hands while they hold the book. This touch is infinitely indirect, deferred, but it continues as a slight, resistant, fine texture, the infinitesimal dust of a contact everywhere interrupted and pursued. In the end, here and now, your own gaze touches the same traces of characters as mine and you read me and I write you.”

Writing, for artists, poets, philosophers, does not mimic the world, but is constitutive of new worlds. The way in which the act of writing itself is generative as well as resistive, is at the heart of this exhibition of nine pieces, drawn from a larger body of works, which were made between June 2023 and now. These works tremble in the light of the world, barely making themselves seen or heard, but persist, making themselves available to a whisper or a wisp of breath, ready to crumble if any power prevails.

A few minutes into conversation with Ravi, one finds his vocabulary infused with ideas emerging entirely from a mind that knows paper inside out. Tensility, porosity, transparency, opacity, folding, creasing, tearing, stretching, layering and covering. However, these ideas don’t just belong to the world of paper. If you dwell on them, they are ideas that percolate into our world and the various ways in which we encounter it. The ideas of opacity and porosity which are very close to the artist’s way of working through his material in these works, hold a very prominent place amongst debates in the world on systems of knowledge-making and their dissemination.

In recent times, the right to opacity has been claimed by thinkers of decolonial and feminist traditions, like Édouard Glissant, to suggest that subjects have agency in making themselves known or not, to the other. This is an important consideration in a data-hungry time. To be not always very easily read or interpreted, is an idea discussed by many thinkers. Susan Sontag famously argued for a way of engaging with art without interpreting it. In continental thinkers, the philosophy of unconcealment relies on the idea of the veil or the layer that conceals, and the ways in which something may then emerge or be unconcealed in experience and thought. In Sanskrit poetics, the theory of dhvani suggests that poems work best through the idea of suggestion – where the intended meaning is not the literal one, but perhaps secondary or tertiary, and can be unpacked with some attention not just to the content but also to the form. The Sangam poets were well known to employ dhvani aesthetics through high symbolism, where nature was deployed as a metaphor for states of mind, and elements like fruits, flowers, trees, almost always represented a human act, emotion or intention. In all these instances, one can see traces of play between the opaque and the transparent language. Against the backdrop of these aesthetic devices, the right to opacity becomes a powerful political device, one may say, to dismantle the convenient structures of ‘content-creation’ that is all-pervasive in our contemporary context.

What content can light create? What form can words create? As if on a flight of imagination, Ravikumar Kashi’s latest works hold in them the quality of a magnum opus – a lyrical ode to one who is content without content (pun intended). What appears before us are forms, moments in time and space, generated from his nozzle-brush – paper rematerialised to the consistency of a kind of pulpy paint – narrating or rather overflowing with language – words, phrases, sentences from various influences and references in Kannada. Each of these forms appear like ‘speech-acts’. The speech-act in literary theory is that act which is self-contained in its utterance – one utters, and one stutters, and the said deed is considered done. The speech-act ascribes a very distinct materiality to language. Language – words, utterances, phrases, sentences, are no longer precursors to the world or its translation, but become the event of the world itself. Words are, as if thrust into action. There is no more meaning-making involved in this act. The meaning is in the act.

Language and the ways it is marked have always assumed surfaces. You say something to break deeper, to hide or show, to make something visible or invisible. You either say or write too much or you write too little. Some things are ‘TMI’ (Too Much Information). Some things are ‘For Your Eyes Only’. Ironically, in Ravikumar Kashi’s world, the surfaces of paper, themselves magically transform into words – form becomes content, and vice versa. It is a moment of philosophical singularity. By doing away with the two-dimensional foreground and background as a default setting in language, the artist’s words are generated in time and space, almost in the spirit of flux or a stream of consciousness. Words are given form by his pulp paint and made available to us primordially as crystallisations of this process of tapping in and out of the subconscious. It is very difficult, thereby, to mediate these works, let alone present them. After all, how does one present a sigh or a scream? And yet, that is the task that Ravikumar has so skillfully attempted. This event of utterance could manifest in a whisper or a sigh, a soliloquy or a scream, an inconsolable sob or a euphoric dream let loose. This eventfulness is contingent and is always flirting with the idea of meaning, but never submitting to it.

To put it simply, language thrives outside of singularity. In a time pervaded by coded algorithms and large language models (LLMs), Kashi’s triumph lies in imagining ways of subverting the code, resisting absolute meaning and thinking of language’s existence outside in the world, embodied.

The Artist and His Material: Ideas in Freefall

Polyvalent and present, Kashi’s works form a culmination of a long-standing relationship that the artist has had with the materiality of paper and its tussle with the ideal world. Acclaimed widely for his book-objects, as well as installation works using paper pulp as his core material, Ravikumar says that if there is anything he values the most in his studio, it would be his innumerable idea notebooks. Contrary to assumptions, given his immersion into material processes, the artist is firmly committed to the world of ideas. Enter his numerous idea books, and one finds fleeting ideas, thoughts, diagrams, drawings and quotes. These notebooks are the site of the origin of several of his works.

Deeply influenced by philosophical ideas of circularity, the cycle of life and death, permanence and impermanence, his notebooks are strewn with diagrams that pertain to sacred symbols in Buddhist thought. The book, for instance, is a critical concept for Ravikumar Kashi, whose book-objects have been exhibited widely across the world.

Therefore it is only natural that he has turned his attention to the units of a book, namely the page. The artist’s painted sentences, when on the page, part ways to allow for something new to occur in the mind of the viewer, just like the idea of sphota, as suggested by Bhartrhari, which refers to that explosion of sense that takes place at the end of a sentence in linguistic structure.

Ravikumar Kashi has travelled extensively across the globe, searching for different techniques, formulae and methods to develop paper into a versatile material to work with. He studied handmade papermaking in 2001 under J Parry, at the Papermaking Resource, Glasgow School of Art, in Glasgow, UK, with a Charles Wallace India Trust grant. In 2009, he went on to learn the art of hanji, traditional Korean papermaking from Jang Yong Hoon and Seong-woo at Jang Ji Bang, South Korea, supported by InKo Centre, Chennai. These deep engagements with the craft of papermaking became the basis for much of his works, later. Over the years, he has visited and interacted with papermakers in various papermaking units in Bangalore, Sanganer-Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Pondicherry, Sikkim, Nepal and Mexico, trying to understand best practices in different traditions of the art of papermaking. The artist now holds a keen desire to visit Egypt, to learn more about papyrus making, and hopes to explore Japanese traditions of paper as well as learn from Kashmiri papier-mâché craftsmanship.

A teacher to design and architecture students for over two decades, he is quick to observe the pragmatic dimensions of artistic practice, trying to connect everyday ideas, experiences and objects, and magically re-imagining them through his nozzle-brush. The nozzle also paints flat paper strokes, thus becoming qualitatively more aligned to the act of painting than sculpting, and yet counters the flatness assumed and associated with the aesthetic of painting.

Experimenting with circular forms, he allows the ‘natural’ to seep into his works in various subtle ways. The ‘natural’ nature of his works is not intended through qualities, but arrives as an outcome of the artist’s fidelity to his process. He foremost always wants to take the time and understand his material. Thereafter, an idea that was born in his notebook lends itself to the flows and throws of his material. There is a tenacity that Kashi displays with his ideas, just like his paper.

When one takes a look at his oeuvre of work over the years, it is evident that Ravikumar Kashi has emerged as a persistent and diligent artist of our times. Deeply truthful to his own life experiences, he has not just been innovative in his explorations with materiality and symbolism, but has also been committed to giving expression to his deeply personal experiences of loss, desire, kinship, his brushes with the politics of everyday, the metaphorical and the literal, in ways that transcend the binary of the private and public.

In the presence of these recent works of his, our thoughts begin to dance, either tethered to the end of a fragile letter, or soaked from incessant repetition, or simply flowing like a waterfall, as if the mind has reached a final freefall.

Bio of the Author:

Srajana Kaikini (PhD) is a philosopher, curator and artist interested in metaphysics, aesthetics, curatorial studies, arts pedagogy, kinship and relations, and the philosophy of language. Her research and writing has been published in journals like Voices in Bioethics, Journal of Sociology, The Deleuze Studies: India Special Issue, Kunstlicht Tijdschrift, Critical Collective et al. Her book of poems, The Night the Writing Fell Silent, in response to works by Jogen Chowdhury was released in 2023. She teaches at SIAS, Krea University and is based between Bangalore, Mumbai and Chennai.

About Ravikumar Kashi:

Ravikumar Kashi (b. 1968) is an artist, writer and educator whose practice revolves around exploring the mechanics of meaning-making. He holds a BFA in Painting from the College of Fine Arts, Bengaluru, an MFA in Printmaking from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Vadodara and a Master’s in English Literature from the University of Mysuru.

In 2001, he received the Charles Wallace India Trust Grant, which enabled him to study handmade papermaking under artist and printmaker J Parry, at the Glasgow School of Art. In 2009, he furthered his engagement with the medium, during a three-week hanji papermaking residency in Jang Ji Bang, South Korea, supported by the InKo Centre, Chennai. Since then, paper has become central to his artistic practice, incorporating handmade papers made from diverse fibres such as cotton, banana, hanji and Daphne.

Kashi has presented his work in solo exhibitions at Gallery Sumukha (Bengaluru), Pundole Art Gallery (Mumbai) and Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi), as well as internationally at the Glasgow School of Art, Air Gallery (London), Aicon Gallery (Palo Alto) and at exhibitions in Shanghai and Belforte del Chienti (Italy). His works have also been featured in museum exhibitions, curated showcases, group shows and art fairs across India and internationally. Over the years, he has received several awards recognising his contributions to contemporary art.

In addition to his visual practice, Ravikumar Kashi is a prolific writer. He has authored several books and columns and lectures extensively on visual art and culture in both Kannada and English. His book on art in Kannada, Kannele, was awarded the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Award in 2015. He teaches at an architecture college in the city of Bengaluru, where he continues to live and work.