Sinechak /سینه چاک/
= The Ripped chest / To rip your chest open
Meaning(translated from Farsi): Suffered, Lover, bothered, sincere /An epic act of love and grief/
In context: Sacrificing all to liberate the truth of self
Background
The act of ripping the chest open serves as a powerful metaphor for revealing one's true self, embracing vulnerability, and seeking deeper truths. This motif underscores human aspiration toward authenticity and connection, represented across different eastern cultures, specially persian and Indian spiritual practices and literary traditions.
Ibn Arabi interprets this ripping and expansion of the chest as a removal of veils between the individual and divine reality. The heart becomes a polished mirror, capable of reflecting the truth.
Rumi (Jalal al-Din Balkhi) uses chest and heart imagery to refer to the place where pain, love, truth, and divine presence dwell.
“My chest opened like a rose, not to show its beauty, but to release the perfume of secrets I could no longer hold.”
"You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens."
"You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art."
"The universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you already are."
Rumi - Paraphrased from Persian
From the flood of events, bright hearts are at peace;In this ruin, the only commodity is moonlight.
Why does the oyster not split open its chest, O Ṣāʾib?
In this age where not many know the value of a true jewel.
Part from Ghazal No. 1660 – Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī
"Did We not expand your chest for you?" Quran,Surah al-Inshirah, 94:1
In Hindu mythology, Hanuman tells Sita that anything in which Lord Ram is not there is of no worth to him. Then, some jealous courtiers ask him that does Ram exist in him? Hanuman tears his chest open, and everyone is stunned to see Lord Ram and Sita in his chest.
Project Description
This project is a hallucinatory search for inner truth through the body as a container of both suffering and transformation. Mythical traditions of self-liberation confront the fragmented, commodified, and technologized subject of late capitalism, recontextualizing its sacred imagery within the dysphoric contemporary body. Dysphoria is framed not only as bodily discomfort, but as a metaphysical disturbance, a rupture between the felt self and the flattened, socially inscribed identity.
The chest becomes a threshold between trauma and transcendence and opening it beyond its assigned surface is a liberating, surgical, and spiritual unmaking of the self.
The aesthetic language of Sinechak centers on states of dreaming and hallucination as valid modes of sensing the self. Drawing on mythic practices, the project embraces disorientation as a sacred and subversive condition, a tool for radically confronting the reality.
Technical Description & Medium
- blurring memory, Identity and the body -
Installation, Collage, fragmented Images and videos, Immersive sound, Unstable Narratives
References
- To be added -