- WRITINGS
EVERYTHING ON
DIGITAL आत्मा - THE WANDERING SOULS
THE WANDERING SOULS
Touch is gone.
Touch is gone away
far, far away,
beyond the skin.
I see you in fragments,
far outside you.
Your eyes,
all shallow.
Do not shine.
Trying to hold you,
in breath,
in self-unseen.
In respite
of fable,
souls tossed,
bodies
turn phantoms
trailing,
with death
of
cells.
The loner you are,
is all I high,
shinning shadows,
diving longings
and more longings
and more.
Down the road with the moon,
beneath the sun, at
the cusp,
of lives
grown cold.
We blur,
souls wandering,
meandering
in hollows.
Out of body,
choking
beyond
fade of time,
what remains?
haunts
of echoes??
Touch
refuses to return
lost somewhere
in
the stride,
along
alive
and living.
Ayan Mukherjee
Curator Note
The body remains while the soul perishes somewhere in an infinite digital space, wandering in search of its real-life identity and essence. Like spirits that speak, eat, hear, sleep, and dress but somehow fail to breathe in the earthly, physical realm.
We breathe each moment in person, in private. Yet, in the context of current times, do we truly live and expand with the air we organically produce? Or are we now defined by the airwaves and technological spaces we inhabit? When the expressions of time evolve, do our natural voices metamorphose into machine-oriented, technologically instrumented echoes?
As humans and relationships stretch their arms toward isolation and loneliness, this state is often sustained, relayed, and even amplified through technological means. Even when opportunities for encounters in physical spaces arise, we often dismiss them, opting instead for the convenience of virtual interactions. A live voice conversation is no longer the default; more often, our connections, conflicts, and resolutions unfold through typed words and the cold touch of a keyboard or pad.
What emerges is the disintegration of personal intimacy and emotional sincerity. Mechanical and superficial modes of interaction often create distance where connection is needed most. Ironically, while technology promises to bridge gaps, it frequently fosters estrangement instead. Is this more decadence than virtue for humanity and its lifestyles?
Virtual personalities, virtual profiles, virtual relationships, virtual communications and so on… The substance of human existence shifts, and with it, the definition and depth of relationships and bonds begin to erode. The natural instincts that once defined us—touch, gestures, emotions, feelings—are contested, manipulated, and reshaped in an age governed by digital communication. What happens to reciprocation—the mutual dialogue between humans, or between humanity and the natural world? Does it falter? Does it suffer?
Consuming the credo of “digital and technological times,” are we collectively facilitating the decay of nature and humanness? As a society, do we exhibit an unsettling juvenility in navigating this new paradigm? What remains of connection when there are no real beings, no camaraderie around us?
Will the birds continue to chirp? Or will we forget to listen? Do we even notice the flowers steadily becoming inert, lifeless under the weight of our indifference?
And so, we are left with questions—a cascade of them, relentless and unresolved. Is there something more? Something else? Or is this the trajectory we’ve chosen—the slow dissolution of our humanity and the growing divide from the organic world?
Perhaps the answer lies in seeking balance. Perhaps it lies in remembering—and rekindling—what it truly means to live, to connect, to breathe, and to be.
Within this unfolding condition, DIGITAL आत्मा X THE WANDERING SOULS emerges from my ongoing curatorial enquiry—an evolving conversation shaped through the shared reciprocations of Paul Holmes, Rajib Chowdhury, Rounak Patra, Smarak Roy, and Ushnish Mukhopadhyay, with sound design developed in collaboration with Sayantan Dasgupta. Each collaborator engages with this contemporary state of being through their own creative practices, gestures, and lived experiences, contributing fragments of thought, image, sound, and presence that together construct a layered field of reflection.
I approach this project not as a resolution, but as a space of questioning—where the digital is neither rejected nor celebrated uncritically, but engaged as a potential companion to human life and energy. I ask whether we possess the maturity to inhabit this relationship with care and responsibility, or whether we remain naive—slowly surrendering agency to the very systems we occupy. Does the digital offer solutions when shaped by human intent, or are we, in subtle and continuous ways, being shaped and controlled by its rhythms, waves, and architectures?
As these questions unfold within the studio space, the viewer becomes part of this collective dialogue—moving through an environment where boundaries between the physical and the virtual blur, where presence becomes unstable, and where the wandering soul searches not for answers, but for recognition.
In this convergence of voices, the project ultimately gestures toward a fragile possibility, that through awareness, dialogue, and shared reflection, we may begin to reclaim a sense of balance—between the digital and the organic, between connection and isolation, between being alive and truly living.
Ayan Mukherjee
Curator and Collaborator
Artist Statement
Elsewhere, Something Remains
My practice moves across moving image, text, sound, painting, and installation, engaging grief, memory, and loss as ongoing conditions rather than resolved events.
Working within an increasingly digital condition, I consider how identity and relationships are transformed through mediated experience—where connection and isolation coexist. As virtual spaces expand, the body becomes distanced from itself, and memory begins to function less as archive and more as unstable material. It fragments, repeats, fades, and returns.
Through a digital scanning process of my face, I generate the primary visual material by placing it directly onto the scanner surface, producing distorted and fragmented images that register touch, pressure, and duration. These scans are then collected, manipulated, and sequenced into a stop-motion video. Through this looping video, repeated gestures, text and drawing, I construct environments were remembering and forgetting occur simultaneously.
In this digitally mediated condition, the self becomes dispersed—no longer fixed within the body, but extended, fragmented, and reconfigured across images, data, and time. Digital Aatma emerges as a space where presence and absence coexist, where memory, identity, and connection remain unstable yet persistent. Rather than resolving these tensions, the work holds them—reflecting a world where intimacy dissolves into simulation, and the human condition is continuously negotiated between the physical and the virtual. In this suspended state, what remains is not certainty, but a fragile trace of being that continues to echo, repeat, and endure.
Ushnish Mukhopadhyay
The Architecture of Absence
My current body of work is a visual meditation on the erosion of intimacy and the metaphysical distance that exists “beyond the skin.” These pieces explore a world where touch is no longer a bridge, but a border.
In these compositions, the human figure is rarely whole. Through the use of digital disintegration, charcoal-like scribbles, and translucent layering, I depict the body as a “phantom” in a state of constant departure. Whether it is a cubicle isolated on a desolate shoreline or a silhouette dissolving into a school of lidless fish, the imagery seeks to map the “hollows” – the spaces where souls wander when physical presence is no longer enough to sustain connection.
By stripping the palette to its monochromatic essentials and introducing surrealist interruptions—floating fabric, black suns, and misplaced furniture—I aim to evoke the “shining shadows” of a life lived at the cusp of fading. This is an exploration of the “self-unseen,” a terminal state where we are alive and living, yet lost in the stride.
Rounak Patra
Skin Piece & Affliction
All my work relates to our bodies and the way they interact with the world around us – through action and interaction, through memory and emotion. The two pieces that are featured in this show seem at first sight quite different – one a miniature video installation and the other a life-sized array of still photographs. But they share similar concerns with one-another, with Ayan’s poem and the theme of the exhibition. For both, a point of departure is the notion of touch, of human contact. In the first, Affliction, it is its absence that gives rise to a kind of fugue state, a form of insanity. In the second, Skin Piece, it is an excess of contact – a probing and mapping that fragments and depersonalises our bodies.
I made Affliction at the height of the Pandemic, when life was increasingly isolated and boxed in. The tiny figure moves around the confined and sterile room in a futile and never-ending state. He achieves connection to the world outside only via the ubiquitous screen, and appears to be captured for study in a plastic sample dish. Affliction was partly inspired by a period of illness, and this informed the second work in the exhibition too. In Skin Piece, my torso is rendered and flattened with a hand-held scanner. The impression of the work is of a skin that has been cast off – much as our alienated, digital lives detach us from our physical selves. The bodily compression rendered by the scanner resembles the invasive prodding and penetration of medical investigation. As with the caged, wandering figure in Affliction, it has been transformed into a specimen to be monitored and manipulated.
Paul Holmes
In an age of endless scrolling and simulated intimacy, desire has found a new marketplace—one without bodies, touch, or consequence. Here, loneliness becomes currency and attention becomes transaction.
‘Digital Khanki’ explores this condition—not as literal prostitution, but as a deeper exchange where human longing is redirected toward illusion. We seek connection in what does not exist, yet feels real. The screen seduces; intimacy becomes performance.
The brothel is reimagined as a metaphorical space where viewers “choose” characters—fragmented, abstract, sometimes grotesque, sometimes hybrid. These unstable forms reflect distorted identities shaped and consumed in digital space.
The viewer is not outside this system, but part of it.
In this unreal space, nothing is touched—yet something is always felt.
Smarak Roy
The Wandering Souls
The body lingers, but the soul drifts—scattered across neon skies and silent, surreal terrains.
Fragments of selves collide in luminous spaces, where identity is worn, performed, and endlessly reshaped.
We appear alive—speaking, moving, existing—yet forget the simple truth of how to breathe.
Our voices dissolve into coded echoes, stretching across artificial landscapes of connection.
We walk through glowing gardens that bloom in excess but cannot feel, cannot return our touch.
Intimacy fades into distance, where presence is replaced by the cold convenience of interaction.
Loneliness multiplies in color, disguised as spectacle within curated, virtual existences.
Nature waits at the periphery—still, unheard, slowly fading beneath our indifference.
And somewhere between the organic and the constructed, the soul continues its quiet search.
Wandering through illusion and memory, it longs to return—to belong, to feel, to truly breathe again.
Rajib Chowdhury