Walt Whitman says, ‘Living is the little that is left over from dying’. Kafka extends this by saying ‘So he gave his whole heart to every leaf of grass.’ Vivek Ramesh Sonawane’s layered and discerning sculptural installations tempt me to offer the quote as a beginning to this review. During my first meeting with Vivek at the artists’ residency, Last Ship, he shared his works with me while his eyes spoke of something I really needed to know. The ‘Burning Wall’ allowed me to unfold some spontaneous thoughts. I wrote a few poetic lines, which led me to experience the undisclosed within him. Here, I share the above quote. In the quote ‘every leaf ’ could be read as a unit, in Vivek’s sculptural installations every brick is a unit. Vivek’s indignant silence in his work ‘Burning Wall’ allows his technical interventions to be a poignant beginning. In this work, Vivek outlives the conventional methodology of creating a wall as a ‘territory’. He prefers an innovative research process which unfolds a creative tool to execute the compassion within him. Vivek’s experiment empowers the wall with humanly qualities. Vivek combines the contradiction prevalent between Nature and civilization in this conjoined execution of technique – intellect and emotion. The ‘Burning Wall’ is a layered sculptural intervention at the entrance of the Fine Arts Faculty in Baroda. Holding mixed feelings of vengeance and dissent, the wall secures within; the sanctity of the space ‘Fine Arts Faculty, MSU, Baroda’.
If you try to listen, each brick will narrate the pain caused by the truth. Each brick will unfold the accumulated vivacity which the wall emanates. Each flame will inspire within you a motivation for melting. Who are you? What is power? What is health and goodwill? May the answers be ‘Not a Reader!’, ‘Not an Alcoholic!’, ‘ Not a victim of Plague’. Vivek chooses to employ bricks in all his works. For ‘Burning Wall’, he visited brick-making factories near Baroda at Bhadran and Savli, researching the process of making bricks. He travels to these places on his bike and buys bricks on a large scale. For the ‘Burning Wall’, he chose to use hand-made bricks as well as thermocol bricks (made at Bharat Thermocol Industry, MIDC, Baroda) arranged scrupulously within the frame fabricated in metal. He chose thermocol to add a participatory, performative gesture of adding fire – an ephemeral material (in the present context) – to this work. This gesture adds a kind of ‘ritual’ to his work. Presently in Nasik, Vivek is researching and working at Vani where he is inspired by the brick-making process all over again. I would like to elaborate on the subjective intercession of this work by addressing a few lines from Franz Kafka. Kafka’s words turn out to be relevant for each one of us even today.