Ravikumar Kashi’s most recent experiments with paper ‘We don’t end at our edges’, curated by Khushi Bansal and Arnika Ahldag at Museum of Art and Photography at Bangalore open from March to June 2025, are a welcome perforation to our technocratic enchantment of the future as we race towards digital singularity.
The Touch of Paper
Paper, a thing that historically marked the start of human civilization, is literally flat and also perhaps deceiving. Paper appears fragile. Ravikumar Kashi will tell you otherwise. During my visits to Ravikumar’s studio, paper is everywhere, but also present in unexpected forms. “Paper is the most tenacious material there is …” Ravi goes on to show me the different kinds of paper that can be made from various plant fibres, each fibre lending the paper a distinct texture, strength and life. What is most fascinating is the close relationship that paper has to life and decay. Much of technology emerged not just from paper but for paper. In the same moment that paper emerged as the mode of circulation of thought in this world, also emerged the desire to preserve it – not so distant from the ideas of birth, death and the afterlife. A certain purposeful way of thinking of this world is owed to this simple material i.e. paper.
What was written on it, became the ultimate word of truth, eternal and binding. Without the written text, legality and all ideas of worldly legislation would not occur. Without the written text, the idea of a mistake or an error would perhaps be unknown. The history of errors perhaps owes a great deal to paper. This same idea of the error appears in the work of thinkers, philosophers and poets, as the marker of a certain human condition. Postmodernist thinker Jacques Derrida, in talking about the trace of the erased text, bases his entire theory of de-construction in Of Grammatology (1967), on this act of ‘écriture’ or writing, its erasure and the traces it leaves behind.
One says ‘language’ for action, movement, thought, reflection, consciousness, unconsciousness, experience, affectivity […] we say ‘writing’ for all that and more […] for all that gives rise to an inscription in general […] cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing’.
Jean Luc Nancy, in his work Corpus (2008), writes about the page as a ‘touching’ of various beings.
The page is a touching, of my hand while it writes and your hands while they hold the book. This touch is infinitely indirect, deferred, but it continues as a slight, resistant, fine texture, the infinitesimal dust of a contact everywhere interrupted and pursued. In the end, here and now, your own gaze touches the same traces of characters as mine and you read me and I write you.
Writing, for artists, poets, philosophers, does not mimic the world, but is constitutive of new worlds. The way in which the act of writing itself is generative as well as resistive, is at the heart of this selection of nine pieces from a larger body of work, which were made between June 2023 and now. These works tremble in the light of the world, barely making themselves seen or heard, but persist, making themselves available to a whisper or a wisp of breath, ready to crumble if any power prevails.
The ideas of opacity and porosity which are very close to the artist’s way of working through his material in these works, hold a very prominent place amongst debates in the world on systems of knowledge-making and their dissemination.
Language-ing the World
In recent times, the right to opacity has been claimed by thinkers of decolonial and feminist traditions, like Édouard Glissant, to suggest that subjects have agency in making themselves known or not, to the other. This is an important consideration in a data-hungry time. To be not always very easily read or interpreted, is an idea discussed by many thinkers. Susan Sontag famously argued for a way of engaging with art without interpreting it. In continental thinkers, the philosophy of unconcealment relies on the idea of the veil or the layer that conceals, and the ways in which something may then emerge or be unconcealed in experience and thought. In Sanskrit poetics, the theory of dhvani suggests that poems work best through the idea of suggestion – where the intended meaning is not the literal one, but perhaps secondary or tertiary, and can be unpacked with some attention not just to the content but also to the form. In all these instances, one can see traces of play between the opaque and the transparent language.
Against the backdrop of these aesthetic devices, the right to opacity becomes a powerful political device, one may say, to dismantle the convenient structures of ‘content-creation’ that is all pervasive in our contemporary context. Kashi’s works pose an interesting inversion of this narrative of opacity in his conscious exercise of writing his works of art – in that the writing is so porous that it edges on becoming opaque to us – pushing us not to read the works but to in fact, let them touch us in affective ways – through the play of light and shadow, through gentle plays with gravity and free fall, through a dance with the walls, the floors and ceilings.
What content can light create? What form can words create? What appears before us are forms, moments in time and space, generated from his nozzle-brush – paper rematerialized to the consistency of a kind of pulpy paint – narrating or rather overflowing with language – words, phrases, sentences from various influences and references in Kannada. Each of these forms appear like ‘speech-acts’. Words are into action. There is no more meaning-making involved in this act. The meaning is in the act.
Language and the ways it is marked have always assumed surfaces. You say something to break deeper, to hide or show, to make something visible or invisible. You either say or write too much or you write too little. The irony of mark-making therefore is not missed in Ravikumar Kashi’s world, the surfaces of paper, where the paper magically transforms into words – form becomes content and content takes form. It is a moment of philosophical convergence. By doing away with the two-dimensional foreground and background as a default setting in language, the artist’s words are generated in time and space, almost in the spirit of flux or a stream of consciousness. Words are given form by his pulp paint and made available to us primordially as crystallizations of this process of tapping in and out of the subconscious. It is very difficult, thereby, to mediate these works, let alone present them. After all, how does one present a sigh or a scream?
“Ravi’s mind never stops. As much as his paper works have kept expanding over time, from delicate small patterned jali like works, to rougher and harder sculptures – growing in scale, we witnessed how he adjusted to spaces and responses. Curating this exhibition meant to witness expanse, in thought, material and time. Ravi is strongly invested in every step of making the work, to installing, to thinking and speaking about it, to lights and flow of visitors. As we don’t end at our edges, the work doesn’t seem to end.”, says Arnika Ahldag, Head of Curation and Exhibition at MAP.
And yet, that is the task that Ravikumar Kashi along with the attention of curators at the museum, so skillfully attempted. This eventfulness is always flirting with the idea of meaning but never submitting to it.
Khushi Bansal, Research Curator at MAP, shares her experience of installing these works – “Paper is a fascinating medium — tactile yet fragile and filled with immense potential. The real challenge? Resisting the urge to tug at its edges. Each installation felt like a new experience, transforming every time. Even after testing the setup multiple times, we were never quite sure what the final outcome would be. But perhaps that mirrors Ravi’s practice, going with the flow, letting the process unfold organically.”
The exhibition subverts two formal logics of global contemporary art discourses – the language of work of art and the boundaries of the work of art, overthrowing English as the language of global contemporary art by filling a white cube space with Kannada and ensuring that no work is experienced in isolation thereby performing the unending quality of the works. Living up to MAP’s commitment to accessibility, a tangible scrap book is also in the space with the various kinds of handmade paper accompanying the show, inviting viewer to touch and understand the material.
Language gains a tangible life through these works and thrives outside of the state of singularity. In a time pervaded by coded algorithms and large language models (LLMs), Kashi’s triumph lies in imagining ways of subverting the code, resisting absolute meaning and thinking of language’s existence outside in the world, embodied.
The Artist’s Ideas and Material
Polyvalent and present, Kashi’s works form a culmination of a long-standing relationship that the artist has had with the materiality of paper and its tussle with the ideal world. Acclaimed widely for his book-objects, as well as installation works using paper pulp as his core material, Ravikumar says that if there is anything he values the most in his studio, it would be his innumerable idea notebooks. These notebooks are the site of the origin of several of his works.
Deeply influenced by philosophical ideas of circularity, the cycle of life and death, permanence and impermanence, his notebooks are strewn with diagrams that pertain to sacred symbols in Buddhist thought. The book, for instance, is a critical concept for Ravikumar Kashi, whose book-objects have been exhibited widely across the world. Therefore, it is only natural that he has turned his attention to the units of a book, namely the page. The artist’s painted sentences, when on the page, part ways to allow for something new to occur in the mind of the viewer.
Ravikumar Kashi has travelled extensively across the globe, searching for different techniques, formulae and methods to develop paper into a versatile material to work with. He studied handmade papermaking in 2001 under J Parry, at the Papermaking Resource, Glasgow School of Art, in Glasgow, UK, with a Charles Wallace India Trust grant. In 2009, he went on to learn the art of hanji, traditional Korean papermaking from Jang Yong Hoon and Seong-woo at Jang Ji Bang, South Korea, supported by InKo Centre, Chennai. These deep engagements with the craft of papermaking became the basis for much of his works, later. Over the years, he has visited and interacted with papermakers in various papermaking units in Bangalore, Sanganer-Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Pondicherry, Sikkim, Nepal and Mexico, trying to understand best practices in different traditions of the art of papermaking. The artist now holds a keen desire to visit Egypt, to learn more about papyrus making, and hopes to explore Japanese traditions of paper as well as learn from Kashmiri papier-mâché craftsmanship.
A teacher to design and architecture students for over two decades, he is quick to observe the pragmatic dimensions of artistic practice, trying to connect everyday ideas, experiences and objects, and magically re-imagining them through his nozzle-brush. The nozzle also paints flat paper strokes, thus becoming qualitatively more aligned to the act of painting than sculpting, and yet counters the flatness assumed and associated with the aesthetic of painting.
When one takes a look at his oeuvre of work over the years, it is evident that Ravikumar Kashi has emerged as a persistent and diligent artist of our times. Deeply truthful to his own life experiences, he has not just been innovative in his explorations with materiality and symbolism, but has also been committed to giving expression to his deeply personal experiences of loss, desire, kinship, his brushes with the politics of everyday, the metaphorical and the literal, in ways that transcend the binary of the private and public.
In the presence of these recent works of his, our thoughts begin to dance, either tethered to the end of a fragile letter, or soaked from incessant repetition, or simply flowing like a waterfall, as if the mind has reached a final freefall.
Note: The review expands on ideas made in the essay by the author in the essay “Word, Paper, Tether” (Kaikini 2025) published by the Museum of Art and Photography on the occasion of the exhibition.
For the Exhibition Details: Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru.