keithdowmaninenglish

Keith Dowman megnyitója,

elhangzott

a Magyar Fotográfusok Házában rendezett

Dereprezentáció című kiállításon

/1999/

I came from Kathmandu and that gives me some kind of different perspective on reality, as some sort of status as an alien embodiment of some separate reality. Why are we talking about the nature of reality, when it's right struck in front of our faces 24 hours a day? Why I should have any prerogative speech on this subject than anybody else, I do not know. The nature of reality seems self-evident to anybody who looks out their senses. While the exhibition seems to adress this nature of reality in a quite original way, I have never seen anything like before. Anything that undermines our sense of the substantiality of what is out there and the sense of it's concreteness, seems to me to be a skillful means towards a greater understanding. I'm suggesting that what we see out there is actually a complete illusion and the function of our own mind's projection.

A friend of mine was walking on the Himalaya a few years ago and at some point he had an experience of completely loosing his head, literally. There was no sense of a physical thing on the top of his body any longer. He rationalized his experience later, he realized this state of "headlessness". He rationalized this experience as a loss of sense organs and the rational faculty, and as an understanding of the nature of reality as an internal experience. Then reality could be understood from within, rather than through the sensory perception, the subject-object dychotomy, but from the heart. The way that he saw reality was as the expression of his creative mind. And the other principle characteristic of the experience was vast space. As if he was weightless and everything else was floating in that space. I think this was a kind of experience in which state buddhist tantric yogis and yoginis walk through walls, fly in the sky, eat rock.

My point is that anyhing that gives us the sense of the illusory of the reality is a strong support to spiritual development. Without this step we could easily miss the point.

From a technical point, the exhibition is made of negative prints on which it's positive is projected, creating a third entity. Besides reinforcing the nature of reality as an illusion, there's also a possibility of concieving the negative-positive opposition as the male-female principles, and in their relationship, a third luminous entity is created. As in the tantric way, a divine being can be born, a greater entity can be born, than their predecessors, transcending the male and female polarity.