This Bit of that Echo
Indranil Choudhury / Tara Aliya Kesavan
July 20 - August 18
Opening: July 19, 5 -8 pm
Transmitter is thrilled to announce This Bit of That Echo, a two-person exhibition of Indranil Choudhury and Tara Aliya Kesavan, curated by Eva Mayhabal Davis and Lila Nazemian, featuring paintings, ceramic and multimedia sculptures.
In the show, Choudhury and Kesavan explore materials, processes, and narrative worlds that speculate on our relationship with the physical culture of technology. Pivotal moments in India’s history have birthed evolving technological imaginaries - from nation building experiments in post independence India, economic liberalization in the 90’s, to its current reputation as an information technology hub. Through the lens of these social histories, the artists engage in novel material investigations that raise compelling questions about our contemporary relationship with technology.
Choudhury’s multimedia sculptures are inspired by the artist’s first encounters with emerging technologies such as cell phones, portable music players, and personal computers. As opposed to Apple’s infectious and seamless minimalism, early advanced technology was characterized by a maximalist futurism — plentiful knobs, buttons, colors, and shapes. The essence of those objects inspired Choudhury’s sculptures which combine ceramics, acrylics, transmitters, wires, and sound. All the sculptures allude to sound-making objects such as loudspeakers, acoustic horns, and audio instruments. Furthermore, each of these objects has been programmed to emit audio composed by the artist, which collectively envelops the space in gently evolving soundscapes. The work is born in part out of a reflection on the evolving cultural values around these technological objects, and how their materiality is suspended between the virtual worlds they transmit and the built environments they occupy.
Kesavan’s paintings chronicle the emergence of the urban, working woman in a newly independent India. They feature female subjects who were seen to epitomize the balance between tradition and modernity, as they entered starkly industrial work environments while espousing a traditional femininity in their outward appearance, clad in sarees and salwar kameezes. Kasavan weaves together multiple public image-archives that played a role in constructing this feminist imagery, including government sponsored documentary films of the “modern Indian working woman” from the 1950s-1970s; the life of seminal female figures such as Saeeda Bano - the first professional female news broadcaster in India; as well as personal recollections of her grandmother's working life as an acoustical engineer at All India Radio, India’s public radio broadcaster.
Through a process of interpreting these archival materials, paintings act as visual palimpsests of a moment in history. The paintings present scenes of women at work in labs and other technological facilities, and emphasize the female subject’s embodied connection to the virtual worlds she encounters - microscopes, speakers, knobs and dials. The subjects are immersed in their tasks and never direct their gaze towards the viewers. Enveloped within pink-hued environments, it is as though we are privy to their private inner worlds. In each instance, their sense of immersion in relation to technological apparatus is based on a deeply tactile engagement - an eyeglass resting firmly against one eye as both hands carefully hold the object being enlarged; a hand resting on a dial or slider, waiting to adjust the volume or quality of the virtual signal they are taking in. The paintings prime the viewer for Kesavan’s sculptures. They echo this tactile engagement with technological worlds. Her handmade spherical shapes are often punctured with openings that reveal different kinds of screens - in some instances a video screen, and at other times physical screens like a glass or a mirror.
Both Choudhury’s ceramic and acrylic-based multimedia works as well as Kesavan’s multimedia sculptures are akin to cyborgs. Choudhury’s artworks embed technology within them and their shapes are also inspired by objects born of technology, yet at the same time they undoubtedly bear the mark of the human hand and even, upon closer look, begin to resemble parts of the human body and its natural imperfections. He explains, “Tensions between the mass produced and the handmade, as well as the functional and the decorative, are ideas I return to throughout my work. Bare speaker wires visually tether all the sculptures to sources of power and signal, while also making the apparatus function. Grids of perforations on clay act both as ornament and channels for letting energy through.” Similarly, Kesavan’s earth-toned sculptures evoke the body while embracing the symmetry and precision of technological forms. They invite us to contend with the screen as a sculptural surface - one whose texture, form and objecthood we may look at, rather than simply look through.
The works offer a different logic of immersion, one that doesn’t seek to induce a state of passive enchantment, instead rewarding a quiet inquisitiveness about what we encounter. The virtual layers don’t untether us from our built environment, but diffuse its rigid boundaries, gently shifting and unfolding subtler dimensions of our sensory experience. The show invites us to mine our collective curiosity about technological futures and the ways in which we engage our bodies in acts of looking and listening.
Indranil Choudhury is an artist from Kolkata, currently based in Brooklyn. His work spans moving images, sound, sculpture, and installation. He has shown work with Locust Projects, Miami, Queens Public Library, and Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning. He holds an MFA from Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts MFA program. He teaches filmmaking, podcasting, and new media at Marymount Manhattan College. He is currently an artist in residence at the Fat Cat Fab Lab makerspace.
@indranil.c
Tara Aliya Kesavan is an artist from New Delhi, currently based in New York. She works across painting, sculpture and video. She has exhibited work at Locust Projects, UnionDocs and Center for Performance Research. She has taught at the Film and Media department at Hunter College and Marymount Manhattan College. She helps produce screenings and events at UnionDocs, a center for documentary art in Ridgewood, Queens. She holds an MFA from Hunter College, CUNY.
@tarakesavan