
the-lack-of emerges as a constellation of gestures across platforms, functioning as a repository where actions accumulate, disperse, and resurface. The project gathers around absences: the hollow where intimacy might pulse, the silence that swallows honesty, the void community once filled. Conversations that could crack open culture's calcified shell or redraw the territories we're told define us have become endangered frequencies, and the work positions itself within this scarcity.
The white cube suffocates. Galleries and fairs perform their choreographies of exclusion, enacting classist liturgies and casteist rituals. *the-lack-of* refuses these diminished theatres and the pale echoes of Western canonicity that masquerade as universal language, proposing instead that the radical act now is making thought breathe in open air.
The project operates as both withdrawal and advance, a stepping sideways into unmapped terrain where pause becomes practice. The experimental and the intimate converge outside sanctioned spaces of display, gathering what has been scattered and tending what has been neglected. The work creates alongside the gaps where something essential once lived, or might yet live, positioning itself as an invitation to the margins where new forms wait to be born.
-Vishal Kumaraswamy, 2019-2020