RUTH BUCK

Her little studio apartment at Sanskriti Foundation is drowned in the cackle of a thousand birds, the unusual calls building up to a cacophony in sudden crescendos, crashing like waves against our ear drums. Recorded at Percé, Qué in Canada, Ruth Buck intends to use these sounds at the Nagaland public art festival in December. Previously having played these sounds at a metro station at Montreal, Canada, the artist piqued the curiosity of the passersby, overlaying their regular associations of the space with new ones. Released from their origin to an urban or geographic setting where they did not belong, Ruth used the sound scapes to create new meanings, deconstructing their notions and experience of that space.

During her ongoing Prohelvetia studio residency stay in Delhi, the artist has been continually fascinated with what she is able to see and find on the ground on her walks around the city, evocative of the contrast and diversity that she thinks epitomizes India. From garbage to manicured lawns to the coolness of the stone flooring beneath her feet at a Mughal tomb, Ruth is currently working on a project where she wants to ‘hang’ pictures of the ground on the wall. Another ongoing project that hangs on the walls of her residency apartment is an artwork made of patterns formed by white and black paper she has left out in the sun, which has faded in contrasting ways in the parts she chose not to cover. 

Using light as her constant source of inspiration and expression, an artwork of hers that the artist wants to carry to Nagaland to work on with the people there, apart from her sound-scapes, is her photo-performance. Titled ‘Blind Date’- the installation, initially put up in 2003 at her residency in Canada, consisted of light boxes with ethereal pictures of the artist in different body postures, silhouetted against the light coming from behind her, hidden behind a gauze screen with only a cut-out for her face, subtly playing with light and merging the image and the shadow blurring the perception of what is reality and what is not real what is hidden and not known. Hidden behind the gauze screen, which the artist recently bought from Nehru Place and fondly shows us, would be the bodies and stories of the Nagas whose faces need to be seen, who are an inconspicuous part of the country today. It is such mediums of expression that the artist works with, where there are multiple meanings new meanings to be discovered where the result cannot be known