Faculty of Art

Criticism and Curatorial Practice

Nina Ankisetty

04:56:20

Working with this concept of control, my poetry highlights the absurd nature of control. For the series "04:56:20", I forced myself to wake up at 4:56:20 AM for 6 days and write a poem functioning within restraints I placed for myself. The words making up each poem had to have a certain number of letters, corresponding to the time. Additionally, on the days when I had to write a poem with words consisting of 0 letters, I still had to wake up and think about my thesis concept, demonstrating the irrational constraint I placed on myself. These poems were then arranged in chronological order, beginning with the first poem with 0 letters, then the poem consisting of four-letter words, then five-letter words, and so on, ending with the last poem with no words or letters. This controlled situation in which I forced myself to work resulted in inane poems. These poems highlight that within this controlled situation, I still tried to bend and flex the constraints to make the poem writing easier and faster so I could get to sleep faster. This resulted in ignorance or bending of grammatical rules, incorporation of other languages, and general frustration. This flexibility demonstrates how irrational it is to control the human body, a natural organism, and how the body still aims to find forms of freedom within these structured situations.