“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”
-Czeslaw Miłosz, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech
Czeslaw Milosz through his poems talked about the terror of totalitarianism and the atomization of humanity under despotism. And in this statement he explains how our society looks at voices of dissent, voices that question the authority and injustice. He shows us how truth itself can scare people like a pistol shot. Our society has been trained to ignore the truth and believe whatever the people in power put forward. There are some people, very few, who are brave enough to go against the injustice and oppression that the authority enforces on the society and more often than not, their voices go unheard, ignored and erased.
There is a false notion that has been instilled in our society that we must never question the established authority. Throughout history, human civilisation moved forward because of a few people who were brave enough to voice out their opinions and face the wrath of the people in power. They were thinkers and inventors and if it weren’t for their fearless stance, society wouldn't have moved forward. Today, we see a lot of voices being silenced and a lot of people pushed to the background. We see the authorities desperately trying to control these voices.
In these works, the artists draw inspiration from conflicts that happen in everybody’s life, conflict between right and wrong. These works bring out how these small dissension can change the way we think and the way we perceive the world. The works are an exploration of the emotional and physical transition that we experience at these particular moments in our life. The works invoke a sense of conflict in our minds and makes us think about how others are perceiving it.
Unheard is a collection of works that reminds us of voices that have been suppressed, the words that are forbidden and the songs that we are ordered not to sing. It's about those moments that have been ignored and forgotten. It's about people coming together and standing for what’s right, standing for justice and standing against oppression and injustice. It’s about our internal conflict between staying silent and acting out.
Tom Joy