Minds to lose (Mentes que perder), 2008-2011
HD video, looped, 11’ 54”
Presented by Project 88, Mumbai, India.
Using a single-screen with multiple divisions, Minds to Lose creates a forced familial commonality between humans and animals—two goats, one sheep, a donkey, and the artist—as they undergo anesthesia and the subsequent loss of consciousness.
The condition closest to birth and to death is anesthesia. When a neonatal infant sleeps, their brain patterns resemble those of a person who is unconscious or under general anesthesia, lacking even proprioceptive and stereognostic sense. Anesthesia keeps the passage of time in abeyance by excising 20 minutes of our memory permanently; we have no sense of our mortal substance.
In 2008 I performed a work titled Petting Zoo for which I anesthetized myself and four farm animals and in which attendees were encouraged to pet us. The footage of the anesthetization has been reincorporated into a single-channel video called Minds to Lose to develop issues of presence and absence that underpin live performance and sculpture. The sedated bodies raise the question of who has a mind and about what having a mind means to a body under general anesthesia. Specifically, the work explored the counterpoints of awareness and unawareness, personality and blankness, volition and powerlessness. The artist and animals jointly present the absurdity of lifeless life as the film weighs the definition and overlapping of the categories of human and animal. Yet even this psychic grouping is challenged as the animals all enjoy a temporary respite from human interference.
The narrative arc is recursive and prompts one to re-link the absurd and vulnerable, the traumatic and intimate. As a friend noted, "Seeing [each animal] stumbling around under the influence reminds us of when we've been in similar states, makes you more conscious of the animal’s consciousness, that they, like us, have minds to lose.”
The sound accompaniment overlays in-synch field recordings with sonic emissions created with homemade electronic instruments that use the artist’s body as the ground through which the electrical circuit is completed. The coda uses the voice of the artist’s niece reciting fragments from a traditional Jain lullaby that attributes the body parts associated with thinking and sensing to various divine arihants and concludes, “If my worldly time ends in the depth of sleep, then I surrender all my five senses.”
No animals were harmed during the performance in Neha Choksi’s film.
Filmed on location in Ghitorni and New Delhi in 2008.
Neha Choksi lives and works in Los Angeles and Bombay. She is a member of the Artist Pension Trust, Los Angeles, and serves on the editorial board of X -TRA, an arts journal published out of Los Angeles. Her work is currently represented by Carl Berg Projects in Los Angeles and Project 88 in Mumbai.