This series of works, in collaboration with French Butoh dancer, Lucie Betz, started with the web I created as a huge installation with black and white threads . It took me one month to create the installation and then Lucie improvised and responded to the creation through her performance. She performed like a body caught in the web struggling to come out. The threads here are like lines and the installation becomes a drawing in space. On dismantling the installation, I was left with a huge pile of entangled threads that I found very interesting. The idea of a series of photographs in black and white germinated from there. As I moved the threads, I felt that the lines moved and the composition shifted. I found this very fascinating. 

Conceptually, a spider meticulously creates a web and a body gets trapped into it. In the video, ‘Entangled threads’, the hands are untangling the black and white threads, while the mind is struggling with what is right and what is wrong. As right and wrong are entwined, there is a continuous movement of hands, busy trying to open the knots, separate the black thread from white thread, but truth and falsehood are enmeshed. The hands busy in the act of untangling the black and white threads are symbolic of the psychological struggle to unravel the truth.

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Playing with various versions of threads, I created a series of three videos: ‘Entangled Threads’, ‘Chaos- Creation’, and ‘Genesis’. ‘Chaos-Creation’ is a double screen video where one screen shows the creation, the other chaos and then both merge to chaos, from opening of white yarn and then black and then entangling them to untangling. It depicts the process of creation, of making simple lines complex.  We all live in the complexity, the fast pace, frantic entangled madness and then get trapped in its web.

In the third video, ‘Genesis’, the hands spread white and black threads and then entangle them. While enjoying playing with the entangled threads, they try to create forms out of it, find meanings. The structures in the space, the hands, and the black and white threads keep moving and become one with each other. The entangled black and white here is not a representative of troubled mind, but of a mind accepting and comfortable with entwined realities, truth and falsehood in complex, jumbled-up state. It creates new forms and in the end accepts the entangled realities of life, with both white and black and the greys in-between.

Is it the psychological act that the hands perform I ask 

Of struggle between right and wrong

Truth and Falsehood

Is the act of tangling and untangling the process of life?

Does it speak about relationships, hurts and betrayals?

Do the tangled lines depict the complexities of life; the web of our desires, actions, unending cycle of Karma, in which we get entangled? 

Are black and white threads the lines of contrast, contradictions and are we always in-between the duality? 

Are they lines of chaos searching for meaning, for truth?

Do the hands that spread the threads white and then black, then entangle and struggle to separate them, tell the stories we all tell, we live in

Is it the act of holding on and letting go?

Does the movement of hands evoke suffocation and release?

Is untangling here a sort of catharsis?

As an artist, isn’t chaos an important part of creation with creation-chaos, chaos-creation an unending cycle?

Aren’t we surrounded by lines visible, invisible that are crossing each other and entangled? 

Are the black and white entangled lines, a constant battle between good and evil?

Do they speak of light and darkness in us?

As I perform the act, I look and I construct and deconstruct, is it genesis of something to come…

As I observe, do I look at my hands performing?

Am I conscious of the act?

Is there a relationship, sensuousness between the touch, feel and material, i.e. threads

My fingers feel, sense, understand and perhaps imagine what is coming

My mind looks at the possibilities…

Has it surrendered to the fact that I can create new forms with conflict?

Have I accepted that conflict can be resolved, but it is also a part of the story?

Am I an observer of the act or its participant?

Am I looking at the form it is taking?

Can I create or control the form?

As I look at the black and white lines moving through threads, isn’t there a shift happening in my perspective, my being?

Aren’t the lines drawn in space moving, shifting and changing?

I desire for lines to untangle, but am I not the one who has created them?

Am I the channel or a ‘sutradhar’?

Am I not searching for my Self in this web of life?