'Scattered Fire' at Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna

The exhibition Scattered Fire considers a 1921public reading of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore’s mystic play The King of the Dark Chamber (1910) to the Vienna Circle by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a historic anchor between the ideologies of Europe and South Asia. A moment where the emerging Western modern strategies of philosophy and mathematics intersected with the mystic symbolism of India. The exhibition gathers the plays’ central motifs of the hermetic, hidden and transformative to reflect upon the interwoven dialogues between Eastern and Western Modernisms, continuing Purgas’s ongoing research into the radical cultural and artistic philosophies of post-colonial India.
June 24, 2022