Syzygy

Akbar Padamsee, one of India’s most important modern painters, is known for his explorations of colour and form. While still a student, he came in close contact with the Bombay Progressive Artists Group (PAG, in 1947) one of the most influential, albeit short-lived, modern art movements in post-independent India. In 1969, Padamsee was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, the funding from which he used to found the ‘Inter-art Vision Exchange Workshop’ (VIEW, 1969-71), a landmark platform for artistic exchange across disciplines. It was at VIEW that Padamsee first made films, creating two short productions– Syzygy and Events in a Cloud Chamber. While the latter is now lost, Syzygy (1970), made in collaboration with animator Ram Mohan, is exhibited at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014.

The title, Syzygy, invokes references to the term’s use in philosophy, where it denotes the union of two opposites; or astronomy, where it refers to a linear alignment of celestial bodies within a gravitational system. The film is a stop-motion animation created out of nearly 1,000 drawings Padamsee made, advancing visually a mathematical theory for ‘programming forms’. It opens with a line that stubbornly refuses to be fixed in a circle. Soon, horizontal and vertical lines appear that rearrange to form a number matrix out of which Padamsee draws combinations to plot a grid. As if plotting constellations in the night sky, the artist then connects the points in this grid, producing infinite intersections of lines and a spectacular procession of forms that dissolve to reveal others hidden within.