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In Tianzhuo Chen’s new work, ‘The Dust’, the artist’s demand to get beyond the body leads him to consider what the performative aspects of ritual and ceremony look like in the absence of human beings. Situating ceremonial objects, farming tools, vultures, which have special significance in Tibetan Buddhism, and the landscape around Cuogao Village and Damu Temple in the Nagqu District of Tibet as the work’s primary protagonists, Chen positions the human condition as inherently Sisyphean. He documents the instruments of mankind’s struggle to atone for original sin, moving from remnants of ancient life and images of natural beauty to water-powered prayer wheels, the wreckage of industrial machinery and rows of human skulls. Chen reveals a world in disorder, objects and instruments linked together by the absurd logic of chaos and creation. “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger,” writes Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. “This divorce between man and his life,
