With the following conversation, I have ventured to engage in a conceptual exchange with Dr. Gindi, a sculptor of nourishing cathartic vigilance.
This interview is conducted by Michael Haiden, a Researcher in Philosophy at the University of Hohenheim, Germany. He is passionate about practical ethics, political philosophy and history of ideas.
Dr. Gindi is chiefly known for her myriad endeavors to formulate answers through the medium of sculpture - to the nature and dynamics of the human condition that – for her – is always fluid and temporary, setting out for the infinite. She employs infinity as a metaphor for the transitioning within the unknown, yet aspirational; presenting fractured narratives that incorporate uncanny veracities and dwell in a realm that is omnipresent.
The odyssey of her figurines evolves organically, often with layovers in unexplored territory, and with many twists and turns. As a result, her sculptures bear an incredible truth. With their nearly blurred flightiness, Dr. Gindi’s sculptures provide a subtle perception of that instant human yearning for the infinite – a cast-in-bronze journey that always remains hazardous but sensually comprehensible. She works within the boundaries of sculpting to construct objects lodged by characters that have a frayed connection to their own destiny – they are floating and folding, sometimes lost in the void of an arcane no man's land.
Spanning both vulnerability and tenderness, her oeuvre emanates a kind of holographic depth and hazy adumbration that indicates the presence of an absence. While her sculptures are suffused with conceivably candid associations, the fragments in her compositions remain just chary of full tonality, their verges cryptic, while still conducting a sense of continuity in the maelstrom of the budding infinite.
Dr. Gindi’s approach is tactile, subtle, and nuanced; in order to comprehend her thinking, one has to get through an individual life journey more than once, seeming to be forever. Beside the generous content, Dr Gindi’s work glistens, not least, by the very poise and allure of the works themselves.
Dr. Gindi, your artistic practice seems to be vigorous as it continually examines and tests the transitory status of the human condition. Why are you so passionately focusing on fluidity, on conversion, on metamorphosis? Can you give us some indication where your imagery of the limbo and its denouement comes from?
The characters in my sculptures often oscillate within the infinite, in the non-space and non-time - a construct that is porous and permeable, they are in a limbo, pulled down by unsettling exhaustion, by roasting breathlessness; it is difficult to say where their beginning ends and their ending begins. By all means they wander around, going through their cameo appearances on the layers of life, crossing many cavities and vacuities - in order to finally reach a state of affairs I call infinity. Infinity is always endless, going on forever – it is the reason, the purpose of why we are wandering, probing, transitioning.
It seems that life is a sequence of variations, an eternal recurrence of the same – but
there is development, we can evolve to something else – provided that we continue to yearn, that we remain persuaded that it’s worthwhile to go out on a limb towards that infinite thing. Even if we are destined to search and to suffer, we can finally grasp unbound veracity. In that premise, infinity does not mean that we are always around in our fleshy nature - and we cannot give answers to the "Now What?" question - what we are and what we are going to be is an atemporal conundrum.
In my understanding, being transitory is not to be reduced to displacement, to a move
from one locality to the other. I rather focus on mental displacements, on soul ridden
displacements. And my work tries to capture the spur of such ephemeral moments, the lucky snapshots of where we are and where we are heading to. Sometimes I even dare to create a feeling of the tripped over, the stumbled upon, as we humans always lumber over grief and futility – we appear lost, somewhere halfway, tussling with the hidden side of reality; a daunting task. But I am convinced that our intermediate state of being is vivifying, it even holds a promise. The universe is an open system. We thrive in that transitioning.
Let’s dive deeper into the passing aspect of existence. Your sculptures are quite literally frozen in conversion, pushing against desires of completion, equilibrium, fulfilment. What do you want to convey with that arid void exposed in your sculptures?
Eventually, our conceived reality is shattered, we come to see ourselves as failed
individuals. Stuck in segueing, left traumatized and alienated. In Self-Laceration Beyond Recognition, a character is confronted with his innate ignition for release, an amorphous certainty he can hardly attain. Instead, he is slowly withering on the inside, lacerated, disfigured. Promises turning into ash in his mouth; doubts nagging at him, pouring soreness on his wounds. The transition is slow and the transformation that happens is painful.
For so long the uncaring of the world around fills us with anxiety. Between birth and death, it is a lingering lane we pass through. My sculpted characters and all of us feel
and kindle some continuous laceration, always on the way to something else. Not quite there yet, the pain is intensifying, stretched in that unknown space, in that unpredictable naught.
They try to make sense of such transitional and abidingly painful human condition, advanced by the felt time and space traveled through. It’s up to them to figure out how and why to continue existing in a sphere that has no apparent meaning for them. They search for meaning.
The idea of yearning and learning identities seems to be omnipresent in your work. Can you describe your view of time? Do the characters you create know what is happening next?
I support a dynamic view of time ... with real flow and genuine becoming, as opposed to the common view of time’s statics and stasis. Time is non-linear, it flows within a process that holds together travail and transformation, in all its permeability. Well, I am trying to incorporate those airy aspects of time, my work is embodied with pliant,
biomorphic forms, some are even spongy and ostensibly pulsating. Look at She that
spreads the Winds: caught in the vortex of a curling breeze, she - almost a firefly - slices through space; swirling her tempest wings; spreading the winds; leaving traces from her hitherto movements, so malleably; setting a fickle impression to frame the unframeable.
Life can go in one or the other direction, a small impulse can cause a change in momentum. Spreading the winds as no unbent lines make up life. Let me rather suggest that our birth is in our death, divulged in one endless moment.
Dr. Gindi, Meandering Souls - Detail
In your idea of man, how do we human beings connect with others?
Look at Meandering Souls: A number of human beings are floating around, together.
Whispering to one each other, hissing in counterclockwise rounds throughout that
hovering space of infinity. Their companionship is devoid of loneliness, in a state of
perpetual folding and unfolding, opening them out to that which is yet to be created.
They drift, intimating an inchoate but all-embracing desire. The characters in my sculptures are in benign interaction with others. They are all one, longing to be connected, to be venerated. They act without calculation, without demanding or even without hoping for anything in return. With my work, I want to promote openness rather than closure, connectedness rather than isolation.
Life-affirming attitudes shall not restrict the freedom of others, who are discretionary
characters on their drift towards the infinite. Empathy is part of our existence; we
cannot exist without empathizing with someone or something. Our human condition,
at the end, might transcend all differences that superficially come to the fore. I would
even hold that a fulfilled life fails to be infinite if it refutes the free rein of other people.
The characters in Meandering Souls create a sense of togetherness in their transitory yearning. Could you talk about what conversion means to you in the context of that interconnected voyage towards the infinite, and why you use it the way you do?
The protagonists of mine are neither somnambulist nor tramps in trance when oscillating within the infinite. Take Flying into Life: A spirit is setting forth the air, immersed but musing - perhaps erroneously or fittingly pierced by rays rather than projecting their gleam. On his passage, he alights from and embarks towards the infinite.
My sculptures try to catch such interconnected voyages in humans’ life. Life is not fully determined and bound to destiny, or - by contrast - entirely self-organizing or even chaotic. Human action is the result of choices and not just caused by physical processes over which we have no control. Of course, what we do is influenced by our
environment, by means and habits. We are prone to all kind of nudges. But there is still room for choice, room for yearning, room for conversion, as we are more than messy flesh that needs to be taken away by the mortician.
Well, Dr. Gindi, that’s absolutely what it is. To move on: you have often alluded to the impact of kairos, the defining moment. How is this carried over into your artistic practice? Could you give an example?
Distanced by jitteriness, Silent Resignation gazes into a spiral of indifference. Existential angst diffuses, passivity sprawls. We can only guess when an inborn flame blazes again, unlocking impulses of strength - a kind of birth. When that moment of kairos arrives, at crossroads. Or falling into the chronos of the darkness, resigning. But I believe that infinity will finally prevail. Retrospectively, the character will have taken the venturous steps towards the recognition of his own infinity.
The sculpted personalities are not empty fabrications - they assert the power to make
decisions and to move from one state of being to the other. They live. I am obliged to
admit though that they sometimes struck a bargain, knowing that a particular choice
was not in their favor in the long-term. But they mostly take the right decision, per reasoning, instinct or serendipity. Whatever they decide they will end up close to physical decay as we all have to die, but they know that they are going to be welcomed to embrace the infinite. Dying then feels like a transition into the next stage of conversion. They realize what is waiting for their alter ego as they already died one million times before.
Let’s come to one of your keyworks, The Fateful Choice – a sculpture that was exhibited all around the world. How does the transitory kernel of the human condition manifest itself in that sculpture?
The young girl depicted in The Fateful Choice might look like a phantom, standing at a threshold, naked in an alien habitat. The floating figure smiles but holds a knife behind her back. Indeed, she is exposed to the eventualities of fateful choices – we don’t know what is going to happen next. The girl seems to be reduced to her essentials. I am not predicting the next sequence, you as the viewer has to decide. Is it death or infinite life, or both? The Fateful Choice, like all of my sculptures, remains open-ended whilst encouraging dispute, and inviting the viewer to parallel his own self-identities.
In our imagination, she might line up the reflections that occupy her inner life, making
her feel sheltered, like inhaling the scents of her strengths. She is part of everything
around her. All of her choices tempt the world around her.
That’s interesting. Your figures seem to be at the turning points of their life - I haven’t thought about that cathartic aspect of your artistic narrative. To conclude this interview, could you sketch out how your practice could help to approach the transitory state of the human condition and achieve catharsis?
My sculpted figures are indeed at turning points of their life. Emotionally lost or separated from the roots of being they stand in front of their very personal abysses; they are plagued by doubts about the deeper sense of meaning that monitors their existence. We don’t know if their fate is drifting in the one or the other direction. A shiver can produce big changes in their life. Human existence can be traced to fateful choices – we can turn the tide of our eternity, or we can vanish into estrangement - unsure about potential polarities, such as fragility and solidity, instability and steadiness, dependence and autarchy.
I am pondering on the question if we are going to be what we have envisioned to be. I leave my characters to the possibility of choices and eventual rediscovering of the infinite. In making choices, human beings not only affect their own future but also that
of humanity at large, in a very factual sense. The infinite is inherent in all our choices.
Life, for me - to extend the metaphor of choices - is the appreciation of all existence. I
endeavor to hail the courage required to bear the entanglements of being, emanating
infinity – the very purpose to yearn for. It is in such catharsis that infinity shines. We
only have to effortlessly allow it.
Main Image: Dr. Gindi, Meandering Souls