Monumentless Moments – the Utopia of Figureless Plinths

Vidha Saumya

6-29.3.2020


Monumentless Moments – the Utopia of Figureless Plinths is an exhibition by Vidha Saumya. Proposed as an invitation to think of monuments beyond their fabricated narratives, political propaganda, corporate values, social sentiment, and the rehearsed, rhetorical, academic vocabulary, the project re-imagines the sites of monuments as transformed spaces for active public negotiation through images, interviews, and poems as conversations between seagulls.

Monumentless Moments – the Utopia of Figureless Plinths through its poems and images intends to clear the space monuments occupy in our minds first. This project carries out an artistic exercise using ‘poetry theory’ to disrupt the normativity of the establishment, even the anti-establishment intellectual industry which in itself is an establishment now. Completed between 2017-2019, the project employs content, argument, research, references, the author’s voice, and the reader’s mind to initiate an emotional and intellectual response about the predicaments of the artist in the art world. The goal is to join the forces of conceptual enquiries and an arsenal of artistic methods – poetic, visual and narrative.

The exhibition is made possible through the invitation of MAA-tila Project Space and Art School MAA. The project was carried out through support Granted by the Kone Foundation.

Publication

Monumentless Moments – the Utopia of Figureless Plinths printed in an edition of 100 copies. Designed and edited by the author with translations by Sourav Roy. The publication includes seven books of poems and a reader. The publication is available for €20.

About the artist

Vidha Saumya is a bookmaker, cook, drawer and poet based in Helsinki. She is a founding member of the Museum of Impossible Forms and is currently working on the project Paper, pulp, words, books: recipes for counterculture rebellion.