Memories fascinate me: Vir Kotak

Vir Kotak’s first solo photography exhibition in the city, The Memory Project, includes two installations, prints on archival paper, and archival prints on dibond, all exploring the common underlying theme: A memory is a random mutation of an untrue recollection. An excerpt from a conversation with the entrepreneur and artist:

What are your earliest memories of picking up the camera? 

I don’t see myself as just a photographer but rather as a visual artist. I find photography a medium I am extremely comfortable with and it helps me express myself visually. As long as I can remember, I’ve experimented with cameras and the multitudes of visual results they can provide.

What’s so fascinating about memories? And how do you bring them across through art? 

Memories are the reason we know that we are alive. They provide the reference point to our very existence. But like history, in reality memories are highly subjective. Are our memories really real? Or did, we over a period of time, project our own prejudices onto what we today believe are memories? Memories fascinate me because you can never quite put your finger on them now, can you?

What questions do you ask and what answers do you get? 

The questions I ask are about the subjectivity of memory, about the longing for holding on to memories that are fading, about the very existence of people not there in your life anymore, about the memories that remain in the instant you know your life will end. Like memories themselves, these questions are quite impossible to really pin down.

You use different media to reach the conclusion you want to reach. Why? 

My deep engagement with art, especially South Asian art informs, a lot of my practise. There is a hint of an influence of Zarina Hashmi, an artist whose body of work I revere, in the visual end result that I have tried to achieve. The stainless steel sculptures serve multiple functions — as a visual binder for the larger narrative, as extension of the play of surfacing, texture, light and shadows in the bigger body of work and as a subject itself for the larger Dibond pasted imagery in the show.

You’re a businessman and an artist. Where do they meet?  

I see myself more as an entrepreneur than as a businessman. I specialise in setting up enterprises and projects, such as India’s first private container rail company. There are qualified people to run enterprises once they have been set up. In a complex environment, to set up something — now that is an art — at least that’s the way I see it. My engagement with art is something that runs deep. I collect, I research, I contribute to the larger dialogue. My own artistic practise is an extension of both my own pursuits to build stuff and being a part of this wonderful movement of South Asian art.