The first room is that of unbridled expression, free of form and free even of thought. Empty walls, white and unblemished, invite all to draw, scribble, graffiti. This is the room where we are all children, a time when thought doesn’t interfere in expression. Infants, children in time, unthinking, unblinking, with our entire lives ahead of us, nothing but a blank canvas.

Then, we grow up, as school-going children, we learn what it is to be a person in the world. We learn language and through language, we learn mathematics and science and all that we need to know to become working functionaries. In this second room, the walls are covered with pages torn from notebooks, pages that are marked up and graded, school assignments that are measured against an unknowable yet universal standard. 

The teenage years are one of rebellion, an attempt to reassert that childish abandon and chart out a path that is ours alone, not dictated by anyone else. It is a time when youth still arms the young with ideals. We are still free, we have not yet succumbed and it is our last stand before we finally give in. There are drawings, paintings and sketches here. Eruptions of colour here, stark self-portraits there, amid Guns N Roses cassette tapes and Nabokov novels.

As adults we begin to believe in patterns and routines. Habits become essential to our identity. We cultivate who we are through what repeats every day. We wake up, we go to work, we come home, we sleep. Rinse and repeat. In this room, everything is perfectly ordered. Cigarette stubs, paint cans and coffee filters, all in perfect patterns, an attempt to impose order on the chaos of our lives.

As we grow older and older, we become ossified; our habits become who we are. And then, we die. This room is dark, id stick figures, all breasts and phallus decorate the walls. In the darkness of death, we become who we once were, who we are and who we could be. All possibilities collapse into one. But death is only the beginning.

After death, there is a rebirth. A wide, expansive open room where the walls are covered with bright paintings that leap out at you. Basquiat images that churn colour and imagery into a frenzied amalgam. It is a dizzying awakening from the sleep of death, a welcome relief, an assertion that everything dies, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies, someday comes back.

These six rooms are quite literal. They are part of the exhibition Wake by artist Anand Suvam at the Nepal Art Council, which ran for a week until October 12. The exhibition took viewers on a journey from the innocence of a child to the rebirth of the artist. The transition from room to room is a literal journey through the experiences of the artist, who had stopped making art fourteen years ago and now, has exploded in a frenzy. This eruption could only take place after a metaphorical death, and a recognition that the kind of art we all too often indulge in is not the art that we should always strive to make. “Art is not so far-fetched as the modern art industry so cleverly makes us believe,” Suvam’s artist statement reads. “Art is the innocent doodle of a child on the walls, who when unable to speak resorts to draw mysterious hieroglyphics. Art is the defeated silence of a student on exam papers. Art is the lonely tune of an unnoticed musician, who plays in the penumbra of civilisation…Art is every act of resistance to reclaim one’s individuality from the profitable but dehumanising process of homogenisation.”

Clearly, for Suvam, what we understand as contemporary art is the distilled essence of what outside forces consider to be ‘art’. It is a label, a careful selection of the ideas that society at large has deemed agreeable to the public, and safe to commercialise. Contemporary art is that which has lost its identity in the pursuit of being palatable. The exhibition, then, is a visualised distillation of this perspective. Suvam doesn’t offer solutions or even a way forward. He simply puts forward a thesis, albeit experimentally, and asks that we go along. And we do, after all, who among us has not felt the way he does. Our modern world is one that provokes existential crises every so often, not because we are constantly and actively questioning but because we are constantly alienated. We know not what we want but we know that we want something else.

What does it mean to wake? You are born, you go to school, you become an adult and you die. For most of us, that is how the trajectory of our lives go. Not enough of us wake after death. Into darkness we go, never to emerge. What does it take for a rebirth? And who is reborn?