Text by the artist Bill Viola:
"Joakim Eneroth’s new work of images and texts, Short Stories of the Transparent Mind, is the vivid record of a personal journey to uncover the fundamental emptiness that lies beyond and beneath our day-to-day experience of the world. Punctuated by stark and sometimes personally revealing texts, he presents us with a series of striking photographs – naked, vulnerable figures standing in a nocturnal landscape; empty rooms miraculously animated by light and mind; a jumble of footprints, tracks, and vacant streets leading nowhere; signs emptied of their meaning, rooms emptied of their contents and individuals emptied of their personas and limitations.
Eneroth’s spiritual meditation practice, and his camera’s trained inner eye, allows him to peel back the layers of the self and the external surfaces that obstruct our inner vision. The result is a profound meditation on the key Buddhist concepts of Impermanence and Emptiness in contemporary life, and the fullness that emerges within us when our inner mirror is finally polished and the clutter long blocking our vision is cleansed. Joakim Eneroth has said that his goal is to reach the point when 'the story line fades away' and we arrive at 'a moment of being no one going nowhere'. His is a journey we all should take."
SHORT STORIES OF THE TRANSPARENT MIND
Retitled
My transparent mind, your transparent mind, his transparent mind,
their transparent mind, our transparent mind
Alone at last
One month, one room, one window and seven hours of meditation a day.
No telephone, no television, no radio, no internet, no video, no DVD,
no books, no newspapers, no computer, no mobile phone, no music,
no reading, no writing, no talking, nothing.
Just me and my mind.
Turn Around
It is march 1985 and I am fourteen, two months before my mother dies.
I stand before the unknown men that shaped my life and would change my future.
The surgeon, who was reported to the discipinary board for severe negligence
after performing the transplant that would cause my mothers death.
My father, who I didn't know well but who is the person that I soon will move in with.
My mothers boyfriend, who shared her life in the summers in Ireland.
A life where I didn't exist.
And my mothers psychoanalyst, maybe the man closest to her
during my upbringing, but whom I never met.
Not seeing, not responsible
Habitual Being
Delusion
The past is gone, future is cancelled
I'm not there
Being no one going nowhere
In absorbed concentration the inner voice turns silent,
the story line fades away.
It is temporary, but a reference point I keep returning to,
a moment of being no one
going nowhere.
Thirst
This subtle unease of mistaking thoughts for reality
Naked recognition
Here then, form is no other than emptiness,
emptiness no other than form.
Form is only emptiness, emptiness only form
feeling, thought and choice, consciousness itself
are the same as this
(From the Heart Sutra)
