Padmini Chettur

In a conversation with the poet Osvaldo Ferrari, Jorge Luis Borges describes time as “more real than we are,” extrapolating that “we are made up of time and not of flesh and bone.” The writer explains his reasoning by pointing to the experiences in our dream worlds, which he claims are inherently temporal, rather than spatial.

Padmini Chettur uses her body to explore the potential alternate realities when one unhinges the spatial from the temporal, much like as in Borges’ dream worlds. Trained in the classical Indian dance form of Bharatanātyam, Chettur has since broken from this system to develop her own choreographic grammar based on scores of movement and stillness. Chief among her gestures are those of rotation around an axis, as a means of plotting the space through the presence of the physical body.

Chettur’s new work, of a denser time, continues the artist’s research into the ways that our bodies can slow time and rescript the space around us. In this 3-channel video installation, the artist imagines her space as a dense layering of circuits; the dancer’s body can move along these rotations, or it can counter them, using resistance to build, not block. The camera moves in an orbital trajectory, so that the viewer’s position relative to the body in motion is never fixed but must constantly be reassessed and renegotiated. By folding the viewer into the relationship between camera and dancer, Chettur thus disturbs their own conception of time and space, sofening the edges of the absolute. This gentle disorientation is bolstered by the artist’s careful deployment of translu- cent projections.

Text: Kate Sutton