‘…how will I ever know if I have reached the horizon? There will always be a horizon waiting.’ 11 10 ’15 (diary notes)
I am an artist based in Delhi, India, engaged in education, place-making, and situations of associative thinking and collaborating. I did sculpture in Bachelors and later moved to an intersection of mediums, new media and community/social practices that are configured to pursuit and confront the irregular shapes of Time and intimacy in capitalism. This involves conjuring artist gatherings, artist initiatives and peer spaces, staging conversational prompts and settings, overnight jamming sessions, time-senstitive vending machines, gifting live plants to question institutional temporality and intimacies, transmitting sound art over automated phone call and messaging groups, speculative fiction, multi-sensorial collaborative lexicons, video art, artist books, and so forth. My practice-based research into the speeding economy, politics of sleep, occupation and intimacy of night, gestation, time-valuations and techno-temporality has led into examining the vexed question- what is contemporary (from con- ‘together with’ + tempus, tempor- ‘time’) – a shared time and space withstanding the global politics of separation, corporate hegemony, social erosion and systemic crisis. Through modes of collaboration, place-making, and inter-webbed networks, I work to counter individualised ideas of artistic self and solitary practice, using strategies akin to infiltrating the various capitalist microspheres. An artist persona is developed who silently slips within monolithic, individualistic institutions, structures of art, and/or surrounding settled networks, propelling them into the shared grounds of unlikely solidarities and cross-pollinations. Over the years of practicing this artist persona and its configurations within the contemporary art milieu of Delhi, I have been actively involved, along side+with artist-friends and peers, in building the fabric of artist-run spaces, co-created practices, independent shows, gatherings, and provocations, and a shared pool of resources that are drawn from institutions and structures, redistributing them into emergent networks.
I am formed with and through others, hence the artist-self is imagined as an ecosystem that exists in between spaces, webs, networks, transmitted conversations and within communities we engage with; as a lubricant, condensing and diluting, working with the frictions that various interactions with the world generate. I create floating structures and ‘excuses’ to bring people together, that are constantly shifting the meaning-making grounds and boxes. I believe that anything that settles gets consumed and co-opted by capitalism, consumption requires a hold, and hold is always on something that is static, while something floating, moving, windy evades the hold; the floating structure then is counter-capitalist.
My studio (terrace/6464), where I host gatherings, overlooks a dense urban forest and a university, and is as if always in a cusp between knowledge formation and unknown densities.
The technologies and schemas that private/public institutions capitalise through, are employed in my works– attempted by converting time into a currency in my work– KAIROI (2019-’24), a time-sensitive vending machine. Similarly, it’s seen in the collaborative practice -out-of-line-, that uses the disruptive and ubiquitous communication technologies of automated-calling & messaging systems to transmit sound/text works over lines–cables—signals–
[Bio]