Hello and welcome to the Shree Chitra Art Gallery.

I am the gallery director, Clarissa Naya.

If you are listening to this audio guide, then you are currently experiencing our reflections exhibition.

We have dedicated ourselves to finding a range of works by some of the world's most highly regarded contemporary artists.

With this exhibition, we aim to confront arts role as a reflection of the society in which it is created

by featuring a series of works that depict reflections themselves.

If art is itself a mirror, what can we say about what we see contained within art?

It is up to each of us to decide for ourselves.

All of us at the Shree Chitra would like to welcome celebrated artists and scholar, Ramata Mangakaya,

to provide our insights on this audio guide.

As the series includes two of our own works, we hope you will find the glimpse behind the process enlightening.

Humanity has always been obsessed with its reflection.

The famed tale of Narcissus is remembered so well in part because it is the tale of all of us.

We look for reflections of humanity in the movements of the stars in a tree that grows through a trick of chance to embrace another tree

in the cat that defies its stars to become best friends with a dog.

We anthropomorphize wildly, perhaps from a desire to feel that we are not alone,

that we are not the only thinking, feeling, planning beings in the universe.

But because we look so hard for our own reflection, we can never really trust its view.

Do otters hold hands when they sleep because of intimacy?

Or is it simply the instinct of awareness that if they lose each other in the moving waters,

they will be more likely to die?

It is a question that doesn't matter to the vast majority of the population, of course,

...