Premise

Religion informs the life of every person, whether religious or areligious, theist or atheist. The history of religion spans over 100,000 years, starting from the first recorded human burial in the MENA region. Among a number of definitions, religion can be considered as a system of symbols by means of which a community orients itself in the world, with reference to both ordinary and extraordinary powers, meanings, and values. Religion, like culture, is a symbolic transformation of experience. The concept of religion itself has also gone and continues to go through significant changes. However, core concepts, such as community gatherings, sacred spaces, and rituals have persisted over millennia. Raghvi observed that aside from the major world as well as indigenous religions, other communities function akin to them, with examples including the contemporary art world and online communities.

During the Homebound Residency, the artist was interested in how digital communities exist online in lieu of more traditional forms of community gathering. In what ways do the spaces that form as a result of these gatherings resemble sacred spaces? What rituals have developed in these gatherings and spaces? What purpose do these online rituals serve? And, more specifically relating to the question of hierarchies and the concept of purity as a virtue, how do ideas of pollution, dirt, and uncleanness manifest online? Concurrently, how do notions of purity exist in the digital realm? As we experience more and more through our screens, how do we navigate the aesthetics of power and oppression?

 

 

 

Process

In his book “The Essence of Christianity”, Ludwig Feuerbach writes that human beings are dominated by a “happiness drive.” For the most part, we are able to satisfy this drive by doing things for ourselves. When we are hungry we find something to eat. When we are cold, we find shelter. Gods come into the picture only when we are frustrated, when we can only wish for what we want.


Feuerbach states that the religious object is created by superimposing various aspects of human nature such as goodness, anger, love, jealousy, concern, etc. onto nature and calling the result “God.” We also attribute the predicates of nature itself to God, e.g., power, unity, necessity, inexorability, eternity, and infinity. These predicates come together, congeal, and take on a life of their own to create the theistic entity. The theistic entity – or the created God – when it becomes the subject or the actor, begins to address or act upon the human beings who first created it. Once they become actors in their own right, the gods begin to tell us what to do. They impose upon us their commandments and taboos. They bless and curse us. They make us kneel before authorities, sacred and secular. And when we suffer, they whisper in our ears words of consolation.

In the Homebound Residency project, Raghvi was interested in using NFTs as an abstract entity which could function as a theistic entity for her religion. An NFT is a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain, where each token is uniquely identifiable. The scripting standard for creating an NFT simply defines a minimum interface a smart contract must implement to allow for the creation and ownership of NFTs. Then, there are only two essential events that need to be approved – Mint; to enable the creation of a token and Transfer; to change the ownership of the token. Thus, the NFT smart contract, on its own, solely lays out the grounds for induction and transfer of tokens without any guarantee of reciprocal receipt.


If the theistic entity is created by projection of human actors, the theistic entity (God) becomes an actor who acts upon its creators (the humans), eventually, through prayer, sacrifice and mediation, the human/creator get the illusion that we have a handle on fate (theistic actor/God). And so not only does faith change when wishes dominating a society change, but so do the actions of the Gods, and finally, so do the rituals that we engage in to communicate with the Gods. To illustrate this cyclical nature, the artist started working on a series of prints that were created by running broken glass through a printing press. The action of running the glass through the press is not only the causal factor of the breakage, but is requisite for creating the image.


However, by solely positioning humans as the creator of the gods, we ignore the intermediaries who proclaim the will of the Gods, the proctors who preside over the rituals of a religion, and the theocrats who govern its institutions. In her practice, Raghvi is currently invested in an analysis of the role played by the fabulists, the translators, the intermediaries and the sibyls of a religion.


She does this to counterbalance Feuerbach’s wish-based, “demand-side” theory with a “supply-side” analysis. A supply-side approach to organised religion shows that the wishes and aims of religious leaders can often differ from those of their followers, and that religious wishes and needs can be artificially created and induced in others by religion-makers.


Raghvi engages in such analysis by literalising and materializing this religious economy, and does so by minting coins that are distributed over time as actual currency to pay for promises in intimate settings in lieu of actions such as pinky promises. The belief in the promise, similar to belief in organised religion, becomes a commodity, collaboratively produced through ritual interactions.

While the idea of promises, projections, actors and exchanges in organised religion is mostly metaphorical, the performance, staging, and remuneration for the same is concrete. The shift is not just a verbal or stylistic, but a continuation of the artist’s aforementioned process of interrogation into how religious institutions, gods, and wishes are created.


Religious productions and performances employ a broad palette of sensory and sensuous furnishings, such as the echoing sounds of instruments, the smell of incense that is impossible to contain, the taste of consecrated offerings, the heat diffused from a field of lit candles, the sight of awe-inspiring architecture bathed in light filtered from stained glass windows, the intimacy provided at the moment when a believer touches an idol at a spot where thousands before them have ritually touched that same idol. Traditional theological architecture calls for stage-sets – altars, reliquaries, icons, and more – to further the impression that the gods are truly present. Such stage sets not only add to the illusion of the omnipotent’s presence, but also function in a space of liminality, separating the sacred space of the religious institution from the profane world outside. The religious theatre lends a legitimacy to itself by rooting its apparatus in physical, material paraphernalia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outcomes

The project culminated in 3 separate parts.

The first part is a continuation of creating the physical coins. The 2022 edition of the coin that was produced during the residency is cast silver, holds the value and unit of 1 Promise, and says at the back “In you we trust”, a play on the slogan “In god we trust” that is present on all American currency. There is no mention of the physical location, nation or state that minted the coins, there is only my fingerprint in lieu of this location. The belief in the promise, similar to the belief in organized religion, becomes a commodity, collaboratively produced through ritual interactions. Trust literally becomes a currency of this faith, and this trust and belief becomes rooted in the body that makes the exchange. The 2023 edition of the coin is cast silver but coloured gold, and it holds the same value of 1 Promise, but it says at the back “In who we trust”. The imagery shows fingers crossed, invalidating the promise made.

The second part Is a series of 9 prints titled The Will of the Deity is to Break. The series was created by repeatedly running a pane of glass through a printing press. Each successive action of passing the glass through the press captures the cracks created by the previous action, whilst creating new cracks that are captured by the next action. During and after the Homebound Residency, Raghvi has been positioning herself as an intermediary within the religion she is creating. However, glass occupies the position of one of the material deities of her religion. Breaking is perhaps the quality most constitutional to glass, across different compositions and utilities of the material. As an intermediary, when she runs glass successively through the press, she displaces any intentions to create an image from her own wishes and needs onto the will of the glass. The resulting map of physical forms created by broken glass are then “read” and translated according to the tenets of the religion, the way a palmist would read the skin of a hand. Once again, as the intermediary, by reading the cracks formed by the glass, the artist takes on the role of announcing the presence of the deity, but also bypasses taking responsibility for any of her own prejudices or actions.

Finally, the third component is the Stigmatic Fountain, a central sculpture around which the minted silver coins are scattered. All three works cohere under a consistent structure of rituals, syntax, and process. The apotheosis of this all-encompassing vision is the central sculpture. The root for the words Stigma, stigmata, and astigmatism is all the same, and means to carve, to mark as a sign of shame, punishment or disgrace. The highly ornamented sculpture draws from craft and architecture traditions of all 5 world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity), to legitimize the tenets of the artist’s religion by rooting them in familiar material paraphernalia. However, the walls that separate the sacred space from the profane world outside do not completely go around the base, suggesting a prolonged state of liminality between the clean and sacred versus the unclean and profane space.

Across all world religions, there is a binary created and perpetuated, a binary filled with unequal opposites; pre-eminently, the clean versus the unclean. This idea of cleanness may be literal for hygiene or metaphorical for respecting conventions. The world religions all prescribe complex ablution rituals through which one may become free of uncleanness. Often, this ablution is a continual process, and often the structure of the religion makes it so that some persons may never be free of uncleanness. But when we wash ourselves over and over to rid ourselves of uncleanness and uphold hierarchies in society, where does the uncleanness go?

Raghvi utilizes form and geometry to create an inverted structure from traditional religious sculptural components, such as the basin to wash or watch others clean themselves in, tiles with imagery of the systems essential to the religion, the imagery of the open palm and its lines, the pedestal, and the drain as a stigmata. The imagery on the tiles functions as a calendar system for the religion the artist is creating. The windows within the “fingers” are created by fusing glass seed beads to create imagery that connects each mound on the phalanges to a celestial body.

Raghvi’s religious sect has adopted the World Health Organisation’s how to hand wash guidelines as the primary ablution ritual. The World Health Organisation (WHO) is an institution not unlike the system of using the 5 great world religions by scholars of religion and is an example of systems that may seem logical to some and arbitrary to others yet are always socially acceptable and endorsed. These systems function as extensions of intermediaries, and of course the central question remains: Who are the intermediaries that proclaim, proctor, and preside within these institutions? The position of these intermediaries allows for a kind of legibility, wherein certain aspects of their proclamation is perceived as dogmatic and other aspects are perceived as “secular”. The secular becomes institutional, reinscribing the “religious”.

The stigmatic fountain carves a sacred space within the space of the unclean. The viewer is invited to trace the connections between the three artworks and explore the possibilities of increasing complexity in uncleanness as sites of infinite potential.