Towards Opacity: Vikram Divecha

It takes approximately ten minutes for the photoreceptive cone cells in the eye to adapt to the dark. This is roughly the running time of the looping audio narration in Divecha’s Gallery 354 (2019), the immersive installation that sets the central premise to Vikram Divecha’s solo-exhibition Towards Opacity. We enter a barely lit photography darkroom - as our pupils adjust, we are made cognizant of the ways in which vision is inherent to subjectivity. Guided by Divecha’s voice, we partake of an aesthetic experience that unfolds at the creeping pace of what is known in ocular biology as “dark adaptation.” Simultaneously, the voice on the audio narration ushers us metaphorically into Gallery 354: an exhibition hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that houses objects from Melanesia. One particularity of Gallery 354 is its subdued lighting, which one encounters after walking through the brightly lit Greek and Roman wing. It was this shift in lighting, observed by Divecha upon his repeated visits to the museum, that triggered his investigations about vision and darkness. In Towards Opacity, Divecha engages with two distinct apparatuses of capture and display -  the Metropolitan Museum of Art and his iPhone SE - in order to explore notions of failure, fugitivity and opacity.