Measurement from evaporating oceans
2013
FRP, steel, salt
94(h) x 70(l) x 60 (b) in. I 236 x 178 x 152 cm.
Salt, an elemental ingredient of sustenance and of life itself is linked intimately with its capacity to preserve. In ‘Measurement from Evaporating Oceans’ it is at once a shorthand for the domestic, the political and the social facets of humanity. The concentric rings of numerical figures, ostensibly announcing the dates of independence wars fought in various corners of the world, is perhaps a supplication to the circularity of time, of the infinite grooves of temporality. The history of humanity marked by irrevocable pledges of friendship and the irreversible effects of war, with the salinity of the sweat of those who fought for freedom, is only a moment in this epic cycle. It is fitting, perhaps, that this history, fragile and susceptible to forgetting, be rendered through the frailty of salt. The colossal human hand and instrument that looms over the salt scatterings underlines this intangible depth and the futility of human effort to quantify its proportion. Despite our systematic endeavor to enumerate time and codify our history through the mechanisms of chronology, through clocks and dates, beginnings and endings, the unyielding proportion of the history of civilization still remains beyond quantification.
