Chandrasekaran

b. 1959, Singapore

In Yajur Veda, a devotee asked a priest: ‘Who knows this world’s central point? Who knows the heavens, earth the wide air between them?’ He was answered by the priest: ‘I know the centre of the world about us. I know heaven, earth and wide air between them. This altar is the earth’s extremist limit: this sacrifice of ours is the world’s centre.’

This priest performs the fire oblation before an altar. Although the altar is of a fragment of brick and mortar, it is transformed into a cosmic entity and a spiritual centre existing in mystical ‘time’ and space. For us space is quantitative, which is understood it in terms of dimension, volume and distance. For the priest the space is enclosed within the bound figure and is purely qualitative; space is an absolute void, and unity is a ‘sacrament’, the means of which he communicates with a force that stands for life itself. The act of bounding the figure, the fencing of its four quarters and defining its spatial orientations is an act of asserting a space. This pace begins to manifest itself in a sense of primordial substance, and shares in the nature of divinity on a spiritual level.

On a corporeal level we are led to spatial division. The space division in a social order transforms the ergonomics where it becomes adjusted to an order, where a human mind becomes subjugated within the act of bounding. The act of bounding transforms the area of manipulation into a space of comfort zone, whereof the concept of comfort denies the very act of bounding or manipulation. This act of bounding the human mind has become the very manifestation to hybrid into the present social order.

(Text: heroes + holies catalogue, 2002)