Nese Selamoglu in Conversation with Sculptor Dr. Gindi
Dr. Gindi is a peripatetic sculptor based in Switzerland whose practice uses repugnant narratives to address the human search for infinity from multiple perspectives. Believing that we are all able to create purpose in our own lives, she poignantly explores the twists and turns of the infinite through her sculptural tenacity. As time and space never begin nor end, she fathoms out the infinite embodied in the potential–vis-à-vis the actual–as a state of flux beyond reality.
Her new series Finding Ways is a bracing conceptual study of the nature of this concept. The characters, although bold, are depicted in a rather soothing manner–like a holy girl dignified by a broken halo, a distorted and enlightened gardener purposefully trudging across nature, and a dreaming idealist blowing the seeds off a flower. MADE IN BED recently caught up with Dr. Gindi to further explore the inner workings of these protagonists, the temptations of convenience, and the essence of infinity.
Dr. Gindi. Courtesy of Braschler/Fischer.
“We all can find ways to cross the inner abyss.”
Nese Selamoglu: An important theme that runs through your work is the idea of the infinite. Perhaps you could start by explaining your approach to sculpting the human search for ways to render meaning to the infinite. How do you exemplify such a search in your new series Finding Ways? What do you think the essence of infinity could legitimately be?
Dr. Gindi: Thriving to give shape to what humanity can hardly express, especially in times of anxiety and distress, I enter a puzzling conundrum at the intersection of sculpture with life as lived. My new series Finding Ways endeavours to launch a universal inquiry into the existential arousal of infinity and its tonic value. Infinity, for me, is also a metaphor for having the bravery to seize the unprecedented and to allow it to unfurl into life if we treat ourselves seriously. Searching for meaning becomes palpable. The series’ protagonists Sancta, Horticulturist and the maiden of In Reverie aren’t always sure where they’re going, the stakes are high in their personal dramas in which they sometimes appear baffling like Sisyphus, one of the tragic figures in Greek mythology who was condemned to push a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down upon reaching the top. Similarly, my protagonists have been inexorably progressing to deep abysses, descending, and starting again. But they trust themselves to find ways out, overwhelmed by the sheer immediacy of the feelings that come to quarry them: uncertainty, vulnerability, and above all zest for life, raw and excruciatingly real.
You might say that I am perhaps a woolgatherer avant la lettre, as I try to offer commentaries on how to respond to bewilderment, going beyond resignation or cynicism. Finding Ways is about the necessity to act and live in the midst of fluidity and fracture. Being in terra incognita, we humans are sometimes roaming our whole lives if we don’t approach the contingencies of that infinite world. Given the qualms encasing us, infinity itself becomes a ground for human existence. Desperate to reconcile themselves to the casting around of their souls, my protagonists’ truths begin to yield to something new–a succinct way of living from moment to moment with great strides and grasping the power of the infinite.
Sancta’s Broken Halo, 2021.
NS: There seem to be parallels between the approaches of astute inquiry on the one hand and your sculptural practice on the other. Whilst such inquiry is a valuable compass that can help us find our ways, to what extent do you think the characters in your sculptures follow principles of reasoning in general and introspecting in particular? Do you conceive your works as means to provide ways out of the jungle of human beleaguerment?
Dr. Gindi: I shall always muse on reasoning as a tool to apprehend the future, or, perhaps, to confront the present. In the existential here and now, we have to make decisions when ambiguity flows over us, a state in which there are many ways, often irreconcilable when taking a stand on a certain matter. In this vein, my protagonists eschew being turned away, they grow towards infinity as they take decisions. Have a look at my work Sancta’s Broken Halo, which I created to illustrate that we take responsibility for the way we live. A young girl is crowned by a broken halo. The halo alludes to divinity and elevated immortality, but why is it broken? The girl might have a Sisyphean experience behind her, beyond our insight. But now she is radiating bliss in a moment of rare, lucid happiness. Still, that moment is loaded with the ambiguity that spans both the woeful and the cheerful. We don’t know what will happen next. The female character acts in limbo where introspection appears within reach, yet her identity is somehow blurry and distant. Be that as it may, by taking on the responsibility, she might reach the infinite beyond the demurrals of her daily mire. She breathes space, marks time, becomes form, whilst the wind veers westward. Yet crisply she scents a palpable kinship with the present, along with coming on to the future. Ushering in the day. In the face of hindmost introspection about what is real or a figment, Sancta faces alienation, felt as anxiety and fear of decay. But, over and over again, she will become the doyenne of her fate and live a cogent life, preventing a deepening impression of the broken past. She and all of us want to be authentic in our compelling selves. She is radiant. We are radiant.
Sancta’s Broken Halo, 2021.
NS: While we are on the topic of introspection, I want to ask about your view on self-referential localization in reality. Do you think of the etymological forging of existence as a necessary step in blurring the boundary between incarnation and imagination, or just a way of making more evident the motion that is already omnipresent in your sculptures?
Dr. Gindi: Introspection is perhaps a stronger entrance to reality than reality itself. I hence try to express drifting emotions through my introspecting protagonists in, or bystanders in front of, exigent moments of their life. Being in constant motion, their identities are neither souvenirs stored in a cabinet, nor exotic geographies we can travel to; and yet I am offering to search through them as imagined thus incarnated narratives. Take The Horticulturist, a gardener who has committed his life to the pureness and beauty of plants. Germinating his infinite self, he becomes one with his objects of love. His yearning for beauty made him an alluring but bizarre creature that can only be deciphered through the enticement in the observers’ eyes. He is blooming just for us. Still, he is nature’s plaything, forging an existence beyond ordinary everyday life.
One major reason why we humans often do not live genuine lives is that we are consistently befogged by the temptations of convenience, a rational mindset that is often anti-nature. The Horticulturist, in contrast, has nothing to hide and lose, he is neither wearing a mask nor guilt. With devotion rising from the daisies to the roses he believes that the flowers that grow on earth will tell us how to let beings and beings be. Imagination and incarnation federate at the entrance of his garden. And he waters his plants.
In Reverie, 2022.
NS: Turning to your newest work, In Reverie is an epic address of human yearning. I was battered by a feeling of both the depth of exuberance and a very existential condition within it–that there is no meaning of life other than what we create in our fluid reality. Did conceiving this work channel some of the eternal truths of mankind into existence?
Dr. Gindi: Yearning brings us an opportunity to know ourselves and where our own subjectivity might be entering into the decisions we make. Yet, I do not want to deliver us to the brink of nihilism. Life is not fundamentally empty of all meaning, as some cartographers of the human soul might claim. I want to rather allow life’s integral fullness to permeate everything. In Reverie depicts a joust between determination and deliberation in a female figure blowing the seeds off a flower in a rather genuine manner. Feeling completely at peace with herself, she is not hovering on the edge of the abyss. When sculpting this work, I was humming an invented nursery rhyme, something like, ‘Flower having kept me, Flower taking all of me, Flower giving sense to me.’ I was really imagining flowers all the time, in all their August colours and forms. Although Reverie blows a seed of nature, she leaves our nature untouched, seemingly satisfied with the inter-zones of human life that lie in between the binaries of certainty. Perhaps opposing forces awaiting release or conclusion don’t really play a role for her. She manages to find meaning in her life, having overcome the fear of the unknown.
If anything, I want to offer the idea that we need to be able to lose control, acknowledging that a life of motion also requires contentment and yearning. In Reverie becomes an index for human detachment, based on the take that we are thrown into life. Espying how to devote ourselves to yearning when yearnings devote themselves to us under the arch of the firmament.
In Reverie, 2022.
NS: Your work is appealingly alive to the inhibitions as well as pleasures of humanity. As a sapient grounded artist working with sculpture, how would you describe the trajectory of yourself, your own way of finding ways?
Dr. Gindi: This is an important and rather personal question and I probably won’t be able to avoid generalisation or some form of nostalgia. On the deepest level, I seek to show that all of us have everything we need for an abundant existence. And I admit that we sometimes need to embrace the unworldly in order to understand the meaning of life. My sculpting usually sets off when discerning an unresolved question that I feel I need to further delve into, ascertaining transient ideas and giving them expression. And I mostly find the genuine purpose of a work only after it is created; it looks back at me. Seeing the potential errand of my sculptures bloom quietly, as they are not sketches of humans. They are the humans; conscious subjects rather than other-directed objects to be predicted or governed.
I want to contribute to the quest of where we humans come from and where we are heading to. What are the principles guiding us? How can we find our way? Convinced that those are the most important inquiries to launch, again and again, I hope we can live with the infinite and enjoy it without the resignation that might shadow it. Sisyphus mirrors resilience in the face of such a boundless world: he–like my own protagonists–is the savant of his days. And, with a bit of gaiety, one can also imagine me to be a buoyant person, who I certainly am, as each day the sun comes over the hill.
NS: And a final big-picture question–do you believe that human mankind will advance for real betterment?
Dr. Gindi: That is a question beyond any possible answer. We need to withdraw from expectations, as I am ostensibly not a big-picture person and prefer to remain with my little pictures of saints, gardeners and daydreamers, as everybody has to find his or her own way in this baffling world. First and foremost, I am searching to understand what it means to be human, from a very individual perspective, and to exist at all. Being sensitive to human fragility is particularly germane in the midst of arrant disruptions of social order, and I want to applaud the impulses that promise betterment within the human condition. There is hope we can leave our cavities and grow endlessly, finding our true selves.
Thanks to Dr. Gindi on behalf of MADE IN BED.
Nese Selamoglu
Interviews Co-Editor, MADE IN BED