This series started out of curiosity. Who am I?
According to a few ancient traditions, meditations done by looking at paintings and yantras create the door to God and connect the viewer to the Divine frequency.
This becomes an experience of channeling for the painter. In the end, the observer (human) - the subject (God), and the channel (painter) become one. So, in a sense, man redesigns himself as a God.
The desire to create this unification experience, in which the God-Human distinction has disappeared, filled my whole body. So if it exists, I could channel the God within myself and declare my Godhood to myself. I started to meditate on colorful paintings and yantras in Buddhist temples, which have always attracted my attention.
When my calm mind went beyond thought, interactions between what was inside my mind and these divine images began to develop, and the images were reshaped. It was as if I was on a line between the ecstatic, in a state of bliss, and the experience of being. I don't know if it was just a Godly game that my subconscious played on me. How do we prove to ourselves whether our own experiences are final or not?
Was ecstasy or nirvana such a thing? But was the experience of gratuitous happiness, real happiness?
My mind was out of breath, like a drowning survivor. Well, should I even listen to my mind, which has been conditioned for over 30 years, or should I forge a new path in which the light has just appeared in front?
At that moment I became -kind of- an entity floating out of my body. I was watching my body and my painter's hands from afar.
In the middle of a river of light, my body was covered, and the light from my hands turned into paint. My limbs, which were beginning to melt in the middle of the river, mingled with the river of light one by one. My legs, my chest, my heart, my eyes... Finally, my hands disappeared into the light...
When I opened my eyes, I was still meditating in front of the painting I made…
Now, who really am I?
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Rahim Unlu is a visual artist and film director. His work consists of narratives where his personal experiences are combined with myths, tales, and futurism. He is interested in subjects such as psychoanalysis, post humanism, embodied cognition, Goddess culture and simulation theory.
Currently, he is working on new trans media art projects and writing his second feature-length
screenplay.
Beautiful work!