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Untitled: Premjish Achari

Premjish Achari is a curator, writer and translator based in Delhi. His translations have appeared in Indian Literature published by Sahitya Akademi. He has initiated the independent curatorial platform called Future Collaborations aiming at theoretically and politically informed curation. He has recently curated the exhibition ‘Workers and Farmers: The Panorama of Resistance (Prelude)’ as part of the second edition of Future Collaborations at Khoj International Artist’s Association, Delhi on 24 May, 2018. In August, 2017 he curated “A Preview to Desolation” at Italian Cultural Center. Achari has received the Inlaks: Take on Art Travel Grant for Young Critics in 2016. He was also the Fellow for Curatorial Intensive South Asia (CISA) 2017 at Khoj International Artist’s Association. In 2018 he received the Art Scribes Award by Prameya Art Foundation for developing new curatorial paradigms and as part of the Award he had attended a residency at Chateau de La Napoule, France. He is currently the Director-Outreach at Art1st Foundation and also a Visiting Faculty at Shiv Nadar University where he teaches art history and theory. He the Co-curator of the public art exhibition "Navigation is Offline" as part of the Bhubaneswar Art Trail 2018. 

I will put a nib on your map
to leave an ink bloat
To see how fragile your territory is 
Would your armies drown in the ink flood?
I know your mighty monuments will be stained forever
A little scratch of my nib will be enough
For powerful tectonic shifts
Your provinces will drift away
Disconnected forever
I will carve out my population safely
You will be framed as a Rorshach model in our classrooms
The Fair of Death
There’s no free entry
But bring a bottle,
alcohol preferably,
if not buy cheap turpentine
That will dissolve the diaphragm,
then your intestines
Here awaits the hedonism of death,
The carnival of the naked king
In his magnificently built glass palace,
The harem of dwarfs
screaming and howling
Acerbic mist
floating around
suffocation, revulsion and explosion within
Tasting blood
The king hailed
in hymns and psalms,
day and night
Dwarfs slaughter the ravens,
then human babies
deformed  by birth,
with crooked souls,
wretched slogans, and
demented parents
The fair of death consumes the unworthy
The troublemakers
Blood stains the glass palace
Artists crawl to paint
Argue whether renaissance is back
Or there wasnt’t one and this is the authentic one
The king departs
Dwarfs howl, beat themselves,
The glass palace burns
The fair travels

There has to be a light somewhere
It can’t be this dark
We were never blind
Only in our sleep
Or when we closed them to hide ourselves from the world
But this is darkness
Everlasting
There has to be a light somewhere

The forage has become easy now
No guilt to hide
Shame is a noun existing in a moth eaten dictionary
We communicate in howls now
Sometimes painful groans 
No responses
There has to be a light somewhere

Sun exists in a flag hoisted 
Somewhere
The insomnia is contagious
The calendar is buried somewhere
I tough my lips to see they are intact
In memory of a kiss from past
There has to be a light somewhere.

 

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