Title: Precarious-Collage (2020)

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Special thanks to Boris Colin (technical support, he is currently a student in Fine Arts at Chelsea College of Arts), Vimal Patel (research support, currently guest lecturer, History, DMU), DMU Video Library and DMU print lab advisor…

 

Recently these works as part of a group show called  "Speculations On A New World Order", Curated by Anushka Rajendran. (April 16, 2020- May 20, 2020)

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Media:  Digital prints, Slate, chalk, laptop, digital files, paper cutting and written text by black marker.

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Size:  Variable (each image:14-inch laptop screen)

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Year: March 2020 (first display) 

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Description:

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Noisy, blurred, pixelated in their abstraction build up a precarious presence of contemporaneity, opens up a dynamic and desire of truth, absence of truth or erasure of truth, truth as such, truth as something reaching beyond the event, grand-narrative of history, non/information or counter-information.

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My recent photographic installation was an attempt to extend the idea of abstraction. My inspirational source material draws from Afro-American, Dalit-Bahujan, indigenous films and other international films that adhering to the themes of socio-political castration, socio-economic precariousness, race and identity. I have analysed these films from a class perspective by assessing the implications of the films' narratives for socio-economic mobility and social equality. Both corporate and state-sponsored films demonstrate a wilful endorsement of class inequality, masking the aspirational feeling of the masses, obscuring those that perpetuate inequality and amplifying the attachment of the masses to its fettered socio-economic state. Moreover, these films criminalise the image of the oppressed or otherwise romanticise it. A prominent example is "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), which is striking with its racism as the American market and intelligentsia criminalises the image of black people and legitimises a new form of slavery. 

 

My practice predominantly deals with propaganda. In this particular exhibition, I began by examining the possibility of cinematic images with subtitles. The captured stills from a movie are edited and layered on top of each other for the creation of new meaning which can undermine, transgress and confound its original manipulative potentiality. (1)

 

The repurposing of film content and challenging its ideological tangent is theoretically related to Hito Steyerl's "In defence of the Poor Image" (November 2009, e-flux). Steyerl's intervention lies in locating the essence between the 'original' and the 'copy' in a liminal space; where the precise distinction between them gets lost in the (re)production of the difference and repetition of the everyday overlapping of images. Thus, from refuting national culture, or copyright, these images get classified as degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, an identity in crisis and a deformed entity in its excess of representation. Poor Image can be understood as one which is remastered, remixed, has lost-identity, resurrected, lost-focus, over/double-exposed, low-resolution, and pirated. Such concepts, amongst others, offer the chance for accidental, unknown results and new perspectives in the re-reading of the Image. The main argument that Steyerl's article proposes is the potential to question representational politics and its ability to undermine the notion that the imperative in creating an image is to seek high resolution, clarity of image and technical proficiency.

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When I capture a scene from the screen the image is sometimes over-exposed, pixelated, blurred, etc or I have captured something unexpected. A set of images that I had amassed were then edited & manipulated. In the process of layering the overall image, it becomes a high-resolution image whereas various layers become obscured, pixelated, blurred and out of focus. Sometimes I rewrite/edit captured texts or add new text from other images and build my narrative that changes its linear context. If the subtitles become dynamic and responsive, then meaning is conveyed not simply through the words themselves but in how the words are visually presented — what they are made to do, how they dynamically move and transform, how they visually support the narrative. My intention is precisely to change the given context and manipulate meaning in the images, that can offer a new way to see the history of oppression and resistance.

 

If we try to understand the ‘present’ as a linear progression of history, we often overlook other layers that this system is consciously trying to invisibilized. There are a lot of contemporary references that already lose its own traces of origin and become a separate or distinct entity. The historical construction of ‘alienation’ today makes the marginalised section of society more and more precarious. Therefore, the ‘subject of change’ is still a burning question. Oppression and resistance lie in the same social body. These are not separate entities. The body that suffers the oppression, whether it be state-corporate-Brahminical-white-supremacist-imperialist-islamophobic-patriarchal is that same body that resists and continues the struggle. Therefore, the challenge for an image-maker is to capture that particular moment, pause or a transcending point where the resistance and oppression meet, apart or together, it creates the possibility of dissensus.

 

I wanted to question the display of art, where one may think that the artist is 'unprofessional’. I intended to play with all possible sorts of irregularities. I wanted to attack the convention of placing things that is ubiquitous as a norm in the globalised and dominant display of exhibitive art. Thus I have consciously displayed them in an illusion of imperceptibility rendering it incomprehensible for the viewer who is seeking the purpose of meaning-making, hence agency is pushed upon the viewer to find their own meanings.

 

I wrote the word 'History' on a small blackboard and erased it (continuous), to show that if someone can write their version of history, we can rewrite our own. A close relation to this, all images can be seen as a compilation of an inventory of the traces that history has left in us. A laptop was also present to encourage viewers to download these images and re-edit in order to participate in this process of rewriting history visually. I attempted to understand the mass-cultural aesthetic that reflects upon social change. I have tried to build "discursive practice" or "discursive action" that leaves behind the separation of theory and practice to attain a complex analytical view of the world that encompasses visuality and language in equal measure. In this approach, theoretical thought does not freeze up in reflection, instead, layered image-making renders it productive as a creative act of mediation between the theoretical and practical realms.

 

1. This is demonstrated in Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary “13th”