Impossible Questions – Jiggashar Silsila – foregrounds a series of philosophical inquiries into the human condition, beginning with a central paradox: can true freedom be attained in a world shaped by our own relentless drive for control and consumption? At the heart of this exhibition lies a sincere intention to explore the fractured relationship between the material and the spiritual—between the self and the forces that shape it—within a techno-economic system that consumes all life-generating energies in service of its own reproduction. The works do not propose final answers but rather open up a reflexive terrain where meaning is constantly deferred, tangled in a web of relational co-production. The very question of freedom—its essence, its possibility, and its resolution—becomes unstable, constantly undone by its own unfolding. One question breeds another, forming a silsila—a chain of interrogations—where the anguish of being suspended between knowing and unknowing intensifies. In this space of uncertainty, the exhibition gestures toward a different kind of reflection: a plunge into the pool of the self. This act is not a solipsistic withdrawal but an attempt to reconnect with a lost genesis—a yearning for wholeness that recognizes its own impossibility. Every effort to heal, to return, to become whole is met with a new threshold, a new encounter that unsettles and reconfigures the self again. Desire itself is revealed to be a force both generative and elusive—one that moves us, and undoes us, in equal measure.
Laying beyond the all-overseeing eye of a curator, the consortium of five artists developed their works through mutual dialogue and orientation to the spatial layout. Here, the exhibition space does not function as a site of control but as a medium of emergence—one that allows the works to unfold in relation, not imposition. The spatial design, while deliberate, seems almost subdued in light of the turbulent, roiling questions at the heart of the exhibition. This apparent quietude does not dilute the inquiry but rather channels it into a contemplative mode—placing the viewer at a crossroads where resolution gives way to an ongoing, intermittent journey. Destinations dissolve into moments of pause, hesitation, and resumption. Instead of dramatic interventions that rupture form or defy expectations—gestures often seen in postmodern aesthetics embracing the hyperreal or the spatial chaos of urban psychic disorder— Impossible Questions embraces a measured spatial logic—marked by cautious restraint and attuned to the subtleties of encounter. Its gestures are less provocative than evocative, drawing viewers into a space of quiet reflection rather than dramatic upheaval.
Turning to the exhibition’s conceptual framework, one immediately wonders upon entering the space whether our very mode of seeing is being called into question. At the threshold, Shawon Chisty’s installation resembles a modest photo-studio setup — a mirror flanked by green curtains, evoking the illusion of a neutral or universal backdrop. But this is no mere scenography. The viewer is situated in an unstable representational space of visual signs where one simultaneously sees and is seen. The mirror invites self-recognition while defamiliarizing the act of looking; the body appears fragmented, first revealing the top of one’s head on a lower screen before confronting one’s full gaze in the mirror above. This interplay of seeing and being seen—of subject and object, voyeurism and self-recognition—unfolds within a layered structure of simulacrum. The work stops just short of theatricality, introducing instead a tension that suspends interpretive certainty. Within this carefully constructed mise-en-scène lies a strategy of distantiation: an estrangement from habitual viewing that dislocates the viewer from identification and recognition, gesturing toward the differential temporalities of one’s situatedness. Whether this generates critical reflection or a sense of helpless alienation remains open—but it undoubtedly sets the tone for the uneasy discoveries that follow.
A. Asan’s work, by contrast, softly quivers with the breath of a fickle ‘soul’—one that quietly resists the didactic, masculinist tone of “mansplaining”. Though it loses some of its depth of field under the gallery’s lighting, Asan’s red painting holds its ground—emerging from a stateless nebula inhabited by amorphous forms entangled in an animistic prelude. This is a ritual of becoming, where the primal collides with the normative; where ecstatic union is reduced to mechanistic shorthand; where language—an exogenous imposition—veils more than it reveals, cloaking the person beneath the persona. Unleashing a sequence of interwoven narratives that do not merely express, but regulate, replenish, and reproduce the rogue self into a multiplicity of fractured becomings—Asan questions the plausibility of ‘purity’ in understanding, of reaching a conjecture. What lingers is a lament for the tamed self. And so, when imagination dares to take flight, it does so fleetingly—perhaps best captured in Asan’s image of the muzzled horse: a fetishized figure attempting to resuscitate a fading presence, coaxing it back into form. But the act culminates in failure—mirroring a futility: an idea made flesh only to fall short, arrested mid-becoming.
The exhibition flyer states: “As individuals, our desires… are, on one hand, a reflection of our own identity; on the other, they are profoundly shaped by power structures.” This line crystallizes the tension at the heart of Impossible Questions— the negotiation between interior impulses and external forces, between self-fashioning and systemic conditioning.
Desire, as theorized in Anti-Oedipus, is not a manifestation of lack or a teleological drive toward self-realization. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize desire as a positive, productive force—an immanent flow of intensities arising within and across assemblages of the social, psychic, and material. The subject is always already in the making: a provisional effect of intersecting forces, signs, and affects. In Impossible Questions, when artists allow their narratives to remain frayed or unfinished, they are not merely aestheticizing ambiguity—they are engaging the very logic of desire. These open-ended forms invite not recognition but transformation, not a mirror of the self but a machinery of subjectivation. The viewer, like the artist, enters this circuit not as observer but participant.
A walk through Impossible Questions is no journey for the uninitiated. The exhibition draws heavily on a homogenized visual culture. Rather than catalyzing any impulse to localize, the imagery in all seems to emerge out of a prescribed curriculum of ‘knowledge.’—absorbed, digested, and reproduced. It appears less a call to live than a call to know. The gaze haplessly navigates the legibility of rigid onomatopoeic resonances between symbols, metaphors, and their often overly explicit meanings. What is sacrificed in this process—alongside the phenomenology of perception and the liminal passage between image and gaze—is the immediacy of lived experience; the breathing, feeling, temporally unstable subject. The viewer dissolves into the shadow of the theoretical subject of late capitalism, caught in the contours of an aborted creative act stranded amid the ruins of modernist ambitions.
The repetitive use of mirrors—almost functioning as a leitmotif—emerges as choice ensemble aimed at constructing a macrocosm, an attempted remodeling of a womb holding the secrets of everyday reality. Charting its recurring tendencies, the exhibition appears to collectively reimagine what the body—as both subject and object—can enact, endure, or disrupt. Here, one must take into cognizance the concept of zoe—as theorized by Rosi Braidotti—not life as bios, the qualified life of the citizen, but zoe, the impersonal, generative force that undergirds all living matter. In this framework, difference is not merely a social construction or a biological fact, but an ontological event—co-produced by the material and the discursive, the organic and the political.
Dhiman’s doubling of inverted, draped imagery asserts presence through the artifice of veiling—an old stratagem that risks retreating into the comfort of visual tropes rather than pushing the limits of form or perception. One is compelled to ask whether a preference for aesthetic safety has eclipsed the potential of risk. In contrast, Mong’s intertextual layering of line drawings with video projection creates a mytho-poetic sensualization of the self—tracing the individual’s struggle against the schemas of capital. His works occupy both physical and speculative terrains. To expand the possibilities of his works, one might want to recall Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life which espouses capitalism not as an economic system acting upon nature, but as a world-ecology—an integrated set of relations through which capital extracts surplus value from both human and extra-human natures. This formulation collapses the division between society and nature, revealing how capitalism continuously reorganizes the conditions of life itself, including the bodies that labour, reproduce, and endure within it.
Faizur, meanwhile, appears to teeter on the edge of a conceptual buttress uncertain of his footing. The latent potential in his series of signage—both digital and painted—risks becoming reductive, circling around a flattened representation of ‘human bondage.’ What his work lacks in emotional depth, it attempts to compensate for through a stockpiled pathology.
Asan returns to the imaginary of alienated labour through an installation made from discarded fabric. A larger-than-life figure crawls across the wall and looms overhead from the ceiling—not provoking through intimidation, but through intrigue of execution. This towering presence—perhaps a gesture toward the reclamation of justice—carries formal and conceptual force, functioning as both structure and symbol– a vessel of material memory and socio-political critique.
Adjacent to this, Shawon offers a symbolic diatribe on ontological erasure and the disposability of life. His choice of materials leans consciously toward understatement, yet the sporadic bursts of black and white, alongside glittering accents of green and gold, register more as misplaced enthusiasm than compositional necessity. These embellishments, though perhaps intended to disrupt, risk diluting the gravity of his inquiry.
Mong’s triptych stages what reads as a parable of fall—possibly a consequence of human hubris. However, the narrative veers toward overstatement, rendering the symbolism too literal to resonate with nuance.
The exhibition’s final movement unfolds with Dhiman’s wire drawing—a compelling contradiction in both form and content. The wiry bird, archaic and skeletal, seems to rise from the ashes of civilizational collapse, stretching its exhausted wings above another triptych. This accompanying panel depicts a figure ensnared in the paradox of circular linearity—caught between processes of deconstruction and reconstruction. The somewhat disjointed assemblage tosses up, once more, a set of unresolved questions. Are we not to consider subjectivity, embodiment, and difference as inherently human-centered attributes—but rather as effects of intersecting material, social, and ecological forces? What if these categories are not interior truths, but contingent outcomes of dynamic entanglements between flesh, world, and system? Perhaps, the human is no longer the measure, but one thread among many in a densely woven (wiry) web of becoming.
Returning to the formal nature of the display, the exhibition adheres, in both form and content, to the spatial logic of the gallery’s architecture. Undisruptive and elegant, it allows even the modest basket of logs with its profound signification—pierced with pins in mimicry of human sensory organs—to rest peacefully in a corner beneath a soft hanging light. Peripheral within the display scheme, this basket simply becomes a conceptual footnote, a tagline.
Judith Butler reminds us that “ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when …our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human.” While the exhibition may lean toward a cerebral autopsy of contemporary ‘being,’ it is in its quieter moments—where narratives fray and relational intensities spill into the public realm—that its ethical potential truly emerges. These are not merely aesthetic gestures but affective encounters: unfixed, unpredictable, and transformative. They ask both artist and viewer to risk themselves, to dwell in ambiguity, and to become undone in relation to others. In this sense, the exhibition’s strength lies not in its mastery of meaning, but in its capacity to generate fields of subjectivation—where art becomes an ethics of encounter, a space for becoming otherwise.