The Infinite Episode 1 & 2

2015-16
Dental plaster
472 x 31 x 9 in. / 1200 x 79 x 23 cm. (plinth dimensions)

Installation view, NGMA, New Delhi

The Infinite Episode explores a question many of us may have asked as children: where do we go when we sleep? Cast in dental plaster, various species—a rhinoceros, a chimpanzee, a swan, a cow among them—are curled up in positions of sleep. They are scaled down to the same size, equalised in their state of wistful slumber as if they had collapsed into themselves. Sleep is evoked here as a state that negates conventional ideas of time—a ‘brief’ interlude of eternity into which we recede every night. The paradox of sleep as a state that is simultaneously finite and infinite, a state of endless time and an existence outside time, life and death, is alluded to in the title where the idea of infinity is thwarted by assigning it a duration.