This week’s meditation session is led by Tracy Cochran and the theme is Emptiness.

For the Rubin Museum’s 2018 exhibition A Lost Future, The Otolith Group created a body of work that engages with the educational principles of Visva Bharati, the art school founded by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan in West Bengal, India, in 1921. As a real place and as portrayed by The Otolith Group, Santiniketan inspires a reimagining of the space for learning in the past, present, and future.
In this work, an archival image of a woman seated under a doorway is collaged into a photograph of the empty central campus of Kala Bhavan at Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, which surrounds the large tree that she partially obscures. Two of the buildings visible in the background contain murals by the artist and educator K. G. Subramanyan (1924–2016), who studied at Santiniketan from 1944 to 1948. By collaging a past image of a woman, occupying the physical space of a doorway, onto a photograph of a current environment lacking any signs of human beings, The Otolith Group has created a kind of nostalgia for past practice. It seems that the artist collective has engendered a sense of emptiness in the present, which allows one to still see the true existence of this space with all of its past, present, and future histories and narratives. The image recalls the idea of emptiness in Buddhism, whereby people suffer because we attempt to grasp at things as fixed. This image by The Otolith Group challenges the notion of permanence that can stand in the way of one’s understanding of the Buddhist notion of emptiness.