VOL I, ISSUE I
spring issue / 2018 / mar-may
tv
THE BROKEN CASSETTE /
contents // Letter From the Editor / 02 A Dissection of Emotions Into Two Tangible Halves: One Grey, The Other Bright Blue / 03 Decolouring Human Emotions / 09 Magritte Over Coffee / 11 Finding Symmetry in the Asymmetrical / 13 Interlapping Cultures / 15
letter from the editor // For years now, I have longed to be a part of something significant and worldly. I would sigh and cry about matters that were out of my hands because I felt powerless and helpless to do anything that could bring change. The Broken Cassette is the lovechild of all the unspoken inhibitions and stories that need to be talked about. It is about the birth of an era where art trumps silence and tolerance does not have to be defined by suppression. It is not a reminder of every thing that is wrong with the world; It is a step towards addressing and changing those problems. It is a collaboration of every voice, feeble and strong, that has something to say. It is an attempt at seeing the world through the abstract lens of art. x Nandini
a dissection of emotions into two tangible halves: one in grey, the other in bright blue // There is probably nothing that is more synonymous with the nature than the moon. It is alluded to in poems, it is the ultimate symbol of romance, and is perhaps the one piece of nature that never fails to garner human fascination. But does colour play a role in deciding how attractive something is? The answer seems to differ when human skin is taken into perspective. This is a photographic study of colour and how it changes our opinion of something being attractive or not or how attractive.
Do flowers become any less beautiful if they are yellow or blue or black or pink or orange or green? Who decides which colour gets precedence over another? If I threw paint on the sculptures, would their workmanship mean any less? Would the emotion they try to portray become different?
Nature welcomes colour and change. The sky changes colour innumerable times during a single day. It has a spectrum of emotions to display. We appeciate all its hues: the rosy susnsets, the tumultuous greys, the cool blues. In a world made up of a whole spectrum of colours, where do we find ourselves? Are the colours structured into a hierarchy? Who decides it? What factors does that decision depend upon? •
decolouring human emotions // Breaking down photos into their most basic component: colours. In the words of Monet, “To truly see, we must forget the name of the thing we’re looking at.” By exploding these images into their most prominent hues, we’re dissociating them from societal expectations, from judgements, from any other emotion that might arise because of their context. We’re bringing the attention back to their aesthetics, their foundation, the very pixels they are made of, because when colour is seen individually, it does not evoke any feelings of anger. It just exists and is appreciated – seen as a part of the natural. But when it is associated with skin, with class, the matters turns in on itself.
MAGRITTE OVER COFFEE // Perspectivism is the ability to look at a single thing in a million different ways. The transistor is the sea. The green cupboard is the forest. The glass bottles are the sea shells. The sunflowers are the sand. Too often, our idea of things, our conditioning of what they are supposed to be, restrict our imagination. It prevents us from seeing things for what they could be. It forces us to seem them how they’re expected to be. Magritte propagated the same ideology. In the much-talked about Ceci n’est pas une pipe, he effectively shows the viewers the importance of forgetting the true name of the object.
FINDING SYMMETRY IN THE ASYMMETRICAL // In trying to find similarities between me and my family members, I clicked pictures of my mother, father, and two sisters and then superimposed them onto my photo, highlighting different features each time. An aspect of human nature is to find your place in the world. To try to fit in and find something that makes one feel accepted and normal. It is because of this that people experience emotions of threat or fear when they come across people that look different than them. These could be people of different colour, people speaking a language we don’t understand, or even someone who acts differently than we do. This inability to accept our differences leads to alienation and hatred towards certain people. It is important to acknowledge our differences, our dissimilarities, each quirk or movement that makes us different. It is only after we acknowledge that we are different and that that is okay can we start our journey of acceptance.
INTERLAPPING CULTURES // Once we start acknowledging our cultural differences, we can work on accepting them. There is no acceptance without acknowledgement, and no acknowledgement without realisation. To appreciate those differences and see them juxtaposed together, a mixed media study was made featuring various cultures on a single plane in coexistence with each other. All our similarities and dissimilarities, when looked at through the lenses of art and aesthetic, seem to disappear into colours and sounds and alignments. No presumptions exist outside the realm of art for it is the most natural.
FICTION & POETRY /
kamikaze heart / Written by Nandini Goel //
kamikaze heart / Written by Nandini Goel //