Altered Text # 36 Songs of Surdas

Youdhisthir Maharjan works with reclaimed text, altering them to create a new language that transcends its humble origin and takes a new life of its own, independent of its prescribed meaning and form. His interest lies in material specificity of text and reasserting the thingness of language, freeing language from its enslavement to meaning, opening it up to new possibilities. I take part in linguistic play, exploring and exploiting text at molecular level where the smallest change can cause enough poetic friction to start a new life.

Texts from reclaimed books are erased, scrapped off, and cut out individually, and pages braided and weaved with repetitive acts of the body, adding a new mark of unmaking/remaking—rewriting.The act of writing and reading becomes a performance.