The World As Light

By Mei Ling Israel

Adi Da Samraj's collateral exhibition at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007), 'Transcendental Realism', marks the first time his work is being shown to the public. The purpose of The World As Light is to provide an overview of his entire artistic oeuvre of the past forty years accompanied by key statements he has made on his own art and on the artistic process in general. Adi Da has created a massive body of highly distinctive and diverse artistic work. He has masterfully used the medium of photography and videography and made it into a form of art that blows the mind and delights the heart. Most recently, he has begun to make remarkable images in the digital medium. Adi Da regards his art as building upon the modernist tradition. He greatly values the radical aesthetic freedom and the profundity of meaning characteristic of modernism at its best. And he intends his own art to convey the deepest of meanings relative to the human situation, and the nature of reality altogether. His art can be understood as an intensive investigation of the human condition the condition of presumed existence as a 'self' in the midst of a world that is 'not-self'. Adi Da's art is meant to call into question the most basic presumptions of ordinary human life: the fact of existing as an independent 'self' , the 'fact' of every 'self' being separate from every other 'self', the 'fact' of the 'self' being separate from the world of 'everything else'. Indeed, Adi Da intends his art to communicate the profundity that is known when all presumptions of separateness are relinquished. The condition of 'non-separateness' as the true nature of the human situation, and the true nature of reality altogether is the core of Adi Da's communication in his art. He offers his art to the world as his communication of reality and truth and, also, as an address to the 'human necessity' for the aesthetic experience of real and true 'beauty' .