Excess
Excess (2016)
A Curatorial Project, Ambedkar University Delhi.
Site: Installation and panel discussion view. Work installed at the abandoned Black Box Theatre space in the Ambedkar University, New Delhi, which was destroyed in a fire in 2013.
Special thanks to Santhosh Sadanand (professor Ambedkar University Delhi) and Shivangi Marriam Sharma (poet) for her conceptual and physical/mental support throughout the project; Alex for Lighting and all Panelists: Amit Kumar (History Professor, Kashmir), Dhrupadi Ghosh (Artist-activist, Kolkata), Shudhabrata Sengupta (artist, member RQS media collective, Delhi), Samudra Kajal Saikia (Visual and performance artist, animation filmmaker, poet, Assam) and Sandip K Luis (Art historian and critic, Scholar, Kerala). And thanks to Rajrani Kumari (Scholar), Avik Debdas (Artist) and Nikhil KC (Artist) for their help to documenting the whole display and Panel discussion.
Dimension: variable.
Media: Installation with mixed media posters, paintings and drawings on cloth, canvas, paper, wall and wood surface; documented photographs of performances; digitally manipulated photographic print; video and text documentation of lots of interviews on ‘collective’; film dialogues and screenshots; glass, charcoal drawing on medical stretcher handmade magazine (part of a collaborative project); 1000 posters projection on tab, textural surfaces by paint, Charcoal, distemper, cement, mud, shit, pop, quotes, tools and so on.
Description:
This photographic documentation was a part of the work called ‘excess’. Here, I tried to set up a non-productive space within the institutional site, negotiating with the dominant mode of production. Once a thriving theatre room, I found the space half-burnt and in a cloud of dust. I spent fifteen days in the space and tried to unfold a layer of central questions to produce them in their multi-layered presence. I tried to relocate different materials with different usability and fusibility and redistributed spectaculars through multiple sizes, textures, words, volumes and mediums. The spectacle was intended to develop into an imaginative visual dictionary - not a literal one, but one where my core idea could unfold in a non-linear, phenomenological sense. The visual regime for the eye is broken and we could enter the work or exit it with our own layers set historically and politically. It tried to problematize and play with the idea of practice inside the studio and outside in the streets. This curatorial involvement made me think in two distinct directions- first, the painting based practice I have engaged with for the past several years, and second, the past two years in the educational institution, which equipped me with a practical and theoretical perspective on my questions regarding the idea of a ‘collective’.
My aim was to unfold the historical understanding of the idea of collective and the pressing question of contemporaneity, which I have tried to address in my own practice in terms of a pragmatic ‘critique of critique’. In parallel, video, audio and written documentation of interviews and interactions with practitioners, contemporary artists, activists, theoreticians and academics capture several impressions of the idea of collective that I have come to gather over the past year. Such surface and sub-face engagements were further pushed into a panel discussion, where I invited five practitioners with whom I have an artistic and political association, to share their praxis, ideas and experience. I was functioning in the space with my own crisis and their entry was to initiate newer ways of conversing and conflicting with the display - for myself as well as the audience.
Video link- https://youtu.be/z6rKfmLriTc
