“Our brain is designed to be efficient,
not accurate”
(Mark Manson)

 

“if I understand everything,
then I would be able to understand everything”
(M.A.R.)

 

Mohamed Azaruddin Rahatwilkar’s practice is a personal quest navigating the subject of uncertainty, using the psychological and philosophical lenses of aetiology and epistemology. This inquiry into the source of belief, and the reliability of interpretations, explores the very nature of trust and doubt, in their widest social sense and of one’s personal self. Rahatwilkar’s work brings an awareness to the unreliability of believed truths, applicable to any range of matter or form, suggesting an open-minded questioning of certainty and a search for appropriate solutions for representation and comprehension.

 

How should reality be perceived and how is truth determined?

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Earlier investigations of dragon mythology stemming from the interpretation of dinosaur fossils, revealed the powerful conflict of imagination and reality, and how small amounts of information alter our experience of meaning.

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Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ teases at the issue humans have in determining reality through sensory perception, and how our senses are limited when determining truth. One may not be shown everything, and only see the shadows of the objects in the cave, – the images presented in Believed Truths play with this paradigm.

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In the chapter “Architects of our Beliefs”, Manson asks his readers to question their own certainty, pointing out the tendency for inaccuracy in creating meaning through assembling associations that are possibly made up of lies. Manson’s insights provide the context for the Believed Truths to begin to generate an understanding of 'understanding'.

 

"Things are what we encounter,
ideas are what we project."
(Leo Stein)

 

Believed Truths is a series of objects presented through dialogically process-based videos, and a resulting sculpture which together interrogate the frailty of interpretation, perception, and human certainty.

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The videos are sets of still images presenting objects made of playdough, plaster, and clay. These were constructed through a process of blindfolded automatism to reduce the artist’s influence on the objects. The work initiates the act of interpretation, offering the opportunity for audiences to absorb and project information in relation to these unfamiliar objects.

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Varying interpretations were received for each object, reflecting the interpreters’ lived experiences, memories, personalities, and associations. The audience interpretations were characterised as voices, illustrating the varying emerging truths about the objects, and creating a distinction between ‘actual/complete’ truths and ‘meaningful/believed’ truths.

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The images were captured using a simple DSLR setup, and isolated from any environmental influence, reducing the experience of stylisation and scale. These videos are now the only way of viewing and interpreting the objects, that would otherwise have been experienced in a conventional exhibition setting.

 

“...what people in this situation would take for truth
would be nothing more than the shadows
of the manufactured objects”
(Plato ‘Allegory of the Cave’, The Republic: Book 7 515c)

 

To be able to make meaning enables the possibility of control and to develop certainty. This screen-based experience of the objects presents them as ‘mere shadows’ of their reality. This process directly references Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’. The experience of the objects becomes consequently an experience of ‘things’ with projected attributes and potential meaning, with multisensory associations and imagined sensations.

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The creation of “Object Number 3?” is informed by the various interpretations of the objects that preceded its existence. These interpretations alter, corrupt, and transform the original objective truth, revealing key elements of the complexity of human subjectivity that creates believed truths and simulacra.

 

 “Our beliefs are malleable,
and our memories are horribly unreliable”
(Mark Manson)