Rupak: Lala Rukh

"Artwork for Documenta 14, April 8-July 16 2017. This is Lala Rukh’s own language, a constellation of calligraphic form, minimalism and symbolic writing.

Lala developed a notational system through her training in Islamic calligraphy and her close involvement with musical traditions from across the Indian subcontinent. Her drawings reflect the live quality of performed music, indexing sonic ruptures and melodic sequences as a graphic sensibility. Her works look to build a stop-motion animation upon the percussive scheme of a Hindustani classical ‘taal’ called ‘rupak,’ which has a seven-beat structure. Drawing turns into movement, rendering the expansion of the beat in time and creating a diagrammatic visual relationship with the pulsation of an instrument.

The visual elements that accrue on her page are often particle-sized, yet they transact on multiple scales. By drawing spaces, she charts horizons, drifting between sight and non-sight and expansion and restraint; her pared-down vocabulary seems almost to have its own agency, often exposing a hidden choreography of cyphers in her scores. "

French