Your Mind After Midnight: Rushati Chowdhury at Spazio Chirale from 15 February

From Monday 15 February Spazio Chirale will host the artistic residency of the talented Rushati Chowdhury, a young and brilliant Indian artist.

Through the windows of our Gallery, at via Ignazio Persico 32, in Garbatella, throughout the week and over the entire day, it will be possible to watch live the creative process that will culminate with the setup of the exhibition event Your Mind After Midnight, opening on Monday 22 February at 5:00 p.m. and on view by appointment until the end of the month.

Your Mind After Midnight marks the artistic debut of the young Rushati Chowdhury — born in Calcutta, with a path that has seen her move through the fashion field from Rome to Shanghai to Augsburg, before returning again to Rome to inaugurate the cycle of artistic residencies at Spazio Chirale, a gallery of process where new technologies are at the service of artists who intend to investigate the always indissoluble relationship between art and science.

It is precisely this encounter between materials science and emerging expressive needs that drives Chowdhury to define a process in which thought takes the form of fascinating organic bioplastics that play between light and shadow, fullness and emptiness, gesture and silence, day and night, exterior and interior.

“How we sleep during a pandemic. How we dream during a pandemic. Where our thoughts take us during a pandemic.”

In the urgency to answer these increasingly common questions, Rushati Chowdhury’s biomaterial forms accompany us in sleep and its disturbances in order to lift us from them. In the inconstant and restless insomnia of this pandemic time of unusual rhythms. In the anguishing and infinite stasis of sleep paralysis.

So every gaze on the world from the window in which we are confined takes shape between colour and transparency. So every form is the image we create, forced into bed, conscious and sentient with our eyes fixed on the walls and ceiling, but unable to move.

Stuck, frozen — as this state of sleep paralysis is called in English.

Stuck, piece — as the single art object is called in German.

Stuck, as Rushati decides to name every single form that makes up the installation.

But the artistic depth of Your Mind After Midnight is not so much the “Stuck” pieces as their genesis. A material composed by the artist with an experimental recipe studied specifically for the installation, and whose degeneration we do not know. A material that thus arises as a prosthesis of the body and mind, as if while matter takes on its forms, colours and textures, the artist — and we with her — were receiving a different perception of the world. The extended mind and embodied cognition discussed by Laura Tripaldi in her book “Menti Parallele”, in which she well describes that spiritual, mythological, ancestral power proper to materials science, which Rushati Chowdhury plastically represents in her artistic research.

Thus the creative process becomes creative in the literal sense — that is, a process of creating the biomaterial, before the forms, the colours, the textures: a process of fusion between the animal and vegetable worlds, and in its repetitive rituality it becomes a process that the artist herself defines as “a process of meditation, of exorcism. A process that acts as remembrance of the eternal cycle of life and death, the wonder of genesis and the acceptance that all organic matter is destined to die in the end — even stars collapse — only to be reborn”.

A process so profound that, in the spirit of the gallery hosting it, it is placed in the window, as an analogy of the room that hosts that restless sleep the artist wants to express. “Fill with yourself the room in which you have lived and died millions of times,” she writes. To externalise in order to interiorise.

Here emerges the cathartic role of the creative rite through artistic thought. As Dario De Marco writes, “…sleep paralysis can be elevated to a metaphor of contemporary life, in which what causes anguish is being conscious of oneself without being able to affect reality…”. Rushati Chowdhury’s action decides to step out of this state by acting on expressive, perceptive, sensitive reality — sharing not the anguish but the material process that lifts us from it, the cathartic process that takes us out of ourselves, an individual process that, by showing itself, becomes collective.