Reers 2015
Artists-in-residence Digbijayee Khatua, College of Art, New Delhi
Khoj Program Co-ordinator & Publication Editor Promona Sengupta
Faiza Hasan, Sarojini Naidu School of Arts & Communication, Hyderabad
Photography Suresh Pandey
Mithun Das, Kala Bhavan, Shantiniketan
Design Bharath Haridas Kabini Amin
Shailesh BR, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda
Production, publishing and copyright Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi, 2015
Utsa Hazarika, University of Cambridge, UK
Printed at
Critic-in-residence Mario D’Souza, Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above mentioned publisher of this publication. Peers 2015 has been supported by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Khoj receives support from The Norwegian Embassy
peers 2015
Introduction The Peers 2015 Residency, held between 28th May to 28th June 2015, was the 12th edition of the annual student residency held at Khoj International Artists’ Association. Peers has been a one of Khoj’s pioneering programmes. It is a unique residency model, closely curated for recent graduates and young artists starting their professional careers. Khoj also provides a platform for young art practitioners who have not been trained in art schools and colleges. The selection process for Peers is through an Open Call followed by final selections by an invited jury of artists and curators. The Peers residency is populated with artists’ visits and interactions, studio visits and curated exhibition walkthroughs, for the residents to have a gamut of art-related experiences and exposure. The residency also invites a senior artist in the role of a mentor, to discuss with and give feedback to the young artists in residence. The aim of the Peers programme is to provide infrastructure, inspiration and mentorship to emerging artists and art practices.
The Peers 2015 Residency was characterised by a slew of mentorship opportunities and studio visits that significantly shaped the practices of the artists and critic in residence in the span of a month. Vishal K Dar was invited to be the residency mentor, giving constant feedback and ideas to the young aritsts. Some of the other visits and talks included a curated walkthrough of Surendran Nair’s solo exhibition at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, studio visits with Rohini Devasher and Orijit Sen, and an artist interaction with Shudhhabrata Sengupta.
These interactions set the stage for the subtle changes and broke ground within the artistic practices of the Peers, as was witnessed during the Open Day. The residency concluded with Peers -- Share, a two-day seminar that had 10 finalists from the Peers selections process presenting their work to a panel of senior practitioners facilitating discussion and feedback on the same. The program gave rise to many questions, collaborations and discussions among the invited artists.
Mario D’Souza Critic-in-Residence Peers 2015
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. - Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
The metropolis of Delhi is a rich cultural stew that boils several bubbles at a time. It was odd for the Peers to imagine what Khirkee would be like, more so when they were located opposite one of the largest malls in Northern India. Right opposite this urban construct was where another kind of stew boiled– one with the laborers, students, migrants, vendors and seekers of a better life – from lands near and afar. Khoj appeared in this milieu as an inn, where several travelers came to live, striving to do things differently and to share a vision of the ‘the road less travelled’Peers was a pilgrimage of sorts, akin to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Chaucer came by as Vishal K Dar and beneath his rather dramatic glares was a voice of reason that guided us gently. The conversations were both accelerated and moderated by his constant companionship at the Tablard Inn that was Khoj, sharp yet always open to debate. The residency boiled a slow cooked broth of work, practices, shifts, anxieties, nervousness and friendships.
The hosts at Tablard were nothing less than it’s producers too (the production manager and curators) -- Promona Sengupta and Sitara Chowfla kept the heat consistent whilst occasionally stirring to make the broth smooth, attempting to season it just right. The panakizhi was guarded by Manoj VP and Adil Akhtar, occasionally loosening the strings for the worthy. The bawdy travellers were heard at every instant, with the resolve to even out the creases from the journey. The narrow sun-forsaken lanes of Khirkee would have otherwise been a maze where ideas harbored were easily lost. But the sun shone bright at Khoj in Sikan Panda’s sun-kissed solar ball installation that loomed overhead. The in-house superhero Suresh Pandey would move mountains and make an elephant slip through a needle hole. If there was someone who bore the brunt of our bawdiness, it was him. It takes hard work and some magic to run this Tablard of our imagination and The Band of Bawdy Travellers are thankful to Pooja Sood, the Holy Spirit of Khoj who followed us through our incredible journey to Canterbury.
Peers 2015:
Contemporary Conversations of An Awkward Assemblage Imagining four weeks in a space that houses a diverse set of ideas, intentions, apparatus, working sensibilities and processes can already be complex from the very onset. Peers functions as an incubator where diverse vocations coming from disparate teaching pedagogies come together in a space of individual as well as collective interventions and introspections. The mythology of the drawing/sculpture/
machine based work of Shailesh B R corresponds with the Blank Verse like quality of Utsa Hazarika’ Video Practice. For Shailesh, mythologies are reappropriated in a contemporary context. His drawings are blueprints towards the creation of an eventual machine. He uses simple titles to deconstruct the term and the weight it entails. Utsa Hazarika’s work on the other hand stems from the idea of impermanence. Her videos and sound pieces are sonically jarring, creating a discomfort and making the eye wander. The tropes are visually like a home video, involving constant murmur as the camera romances the domestic settings. Both, the urban legends of Digbijayee Khatua and the lore of Mithun Das come from traditional practices. Digbijayee initially studied at the B.K.College of Art and Crafts in Odisha and later shifted to the College of Art, New Delhi. Reflective of the greatly adaptive shift from Odisha to the city of Delhi, there is an antagonistic value imbibed in his work. This enunciates itself in the marriage of painting with paper cuts, three-dimensional modeling, usage of objects (both conscious and found), to articulate the structuralism of the city and its operation. He explores the character of the city in opposition to the rural -- the politics of the urban. A Santiniketan postgraduate, Mithun practices in oils, installations and sculptures. Mithun positions himself in a phantasmagorical space. After my conversation with Mithun, I chose to research Magrahat, a suburban town in West Bengal where he grew up. There was a connection to the horrors of what it would be like to grow up in a badland such as this, where murders, clashes, gang wars are a thing of everyday; where a 14 year old Salim
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1 . Digbijayee Khatua | 2 . Faiza Hasan
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3. Mithun Das | 4. Shailesh BR | 5. Utsa Hazarika
leads a gang to one of the most high-profile kidnappings or the centrally located cow slaughter-house renders lakes red. His work chronicles this gore, between the blacks of fear and the whites of desire and the grey in between. There is a sense of agendering to the figure in his work, often rendered lifeless and obese; grotesque and distorted.
tions of practicing within Khirkee, which too like the Peers comes across as the awkward assemblage.
Trained in the disciplines of Painting and Art History, University of Hyderabad Graduate Faiza Hasan works with women-centric themes (not necessarily feminist) rendering them in a space of domesticity.Using domestic canvases along with paper, she uses kitchen napkins and upholstery to embroider pleasing motifs that draw the eye to the work, only to surprise them with the realities of the image, shifting the focal point from the embroidered ornamentation to the striking water coloured visuals of women rendered in the zenana photography tradition, almost in the tone of a parody.
culture, hybridity, its lexicons and its functions in
The bustling neigbourhood of Khirkee is a dense urban village where houses merge and lanes narrow in as tunnels that get narrower as one ventures into this cultural broth of people. It has found its way reactively to all our thoughts and processes. It has worked as a visual icebreaker for most. The streets mask and don various roles throughout the day, with an ascending number of participants in this carnivalesque frenzy where the well dressed, the cross-dressed and the “under-dressed” come together to create an ambience that is ironically and tangibly placed right opposite one of the largest malls and recreation spots of the Megapolis. This is where the debate of the individual and collective artistic differences meets the Khirkee factor – a spatial existence that is so agonistic that one cannot ignore it. The fabric of the locality unevenly, intrinsically and extrinsically contributes to the condi-
the ‘Resist/Reinterpret/Reconstruct/Recontextu-
Mario’s practice is informed by the locus of contemporary and historical socio-political setting . His interests lie in digital modes of curation, participatory exercises of meaning making, the dissemination of text and images in the virtual domain and game culture. His previous curatorial endeavours include ‘Metonymies/Synecdoches’ (Red Earth Art Gallery, 2014); ‘Survey: Contemporary Art in India’ (Asst. Curator) at the Vadodara International Arts and Culture Festival (2015); conceptualized and curated The Full On Film Festival at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda. His writings have been published in The Art History Journal, Insignia, Mirror, The Times of India. He was a participating curator in alize’ project organized by the Department of Art History and Aesthetics, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda under the curatorial mentorship of Rekha Rodwittiya (2013). He holds a B.A. in English Literature and History, Functional Communicative English and a Career Oriented Program in Journalism, from St. Xavier’s College, Ahmedabad and has pursued a Masters in Visual Arts thereafter in the Art History, Aesthetics and Criticism program from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda. He lives and works between Baroda, Goa and Delhi.
Digbijayee Khatua
Digbijayee has completed his Bachelors of Visual Arts in the discipline of painting from B.K. College of Art and Craft, Bhubaneswar followed by a Masters of Fine Arts degree in the same discipline from the College of Art, New Delhi. His work has been exhibited at various places including the Kochi Muziris Students Biennale in 2014. His awards include the Kala Sakshi Memorial Award, New Delhi (2014), The All India Fine Arts and Crafts society, New Delhi (2013), Ravi Jain Memorial Foundation Award hosted by the Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi (2013).
Understanding the eclectic nature of Khoj and its location. My work borrows from nature, my own culture, personal metaphors and everyday life that I transform into something of a fantasy. The work itself, however, is approached with a rather realistic visual language. I create stylized cityscapes and building forms in a sculptural way, attempting to symbolise the constant race that we are engaged in today. These, as well as the found objects that I use in my work tend to gain new meaning by the way they are depicted. My work depicts the contrast and diversity betweenrural and urban existences in close
proximity. These images are sometimes shown in single frames,or otherwise fragmented or spilling out of their frames. For the project I am working on at Khoj,burnt matchsticks and paper have become my main medium. In addition, I have decided to work withphotographs and found objects from the Khirkee village—old wooden frames, water bottles, egg cartons, flower vases, etc. The burnt matchsticks serve as a metaphor for the combustible city and its colossal constructs.
The tale of the city and its cartographer. Ode What does the city mean to you? The subjectivity in the fabric of that question pertains to the identity of the city as a living existence that is reformative of itself. The city still holds what we jargonize as a character. The ‘combustible city’, marked by its incineration and engendered by a school of matchsticks, vulnerable in its ideas of smoke, exhaustion, trauma, ignition and development, forms his point of arrival to the practice developed at Khoj. Discarded objects form the landscape of his cityscapes as he erects them in a sense of perpendicularity, like it were an aerial grab of a dense metropolis or of Khirkee itself. The irregularly dispersed installations cartographed across his studio walls make for several conversations – Metropolisation? Ghettoisation? Distance? Fragmentation? Socio-political inclinations? Economic differences? Urban versus the Rural? Cultural variance? Communal conflict?
The points of arrival are several and deliberately so. Khatua pulls out the ‘trash’, masking it and re-establishing it as a skyscraper maybe or a memorial – the skyscraper as a memorial of the city. Or a gaping black hole of suction that is attractive of its migrant culture, Khirkee for example; or even settlements on an uneven land, with disparate opportunities, extensive adaptation and compulsory accustomisation; a city imagined by its industrial prowess, alliterated in the zigzag of a blade, reminiscent of the factory drawings from middle-school textbooks.
Faiza Hasan
Faiza completed her B.F.A (Painting) from JNA&FAU (formerly JNTU College of Fine Arts) in 2011 with the Gold Medal for Best Outgoing Student (Painting) 2011 as well as the Pervaram Santaji Gold Medal (B.F.A Painting) 2011. She completed her M.F.A (Art History) from the University of Hyderabad in 2014. Her work has been exhibited at the Salar Jung Museum (Hyderabad), Shrishti Art Gallery (Hyderabad) and Kalakriti Art Gallery (Hyderabad). She has also been a curator for the Student’s Biennale at the Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2014. Hasan lives and works in Hyderabad.
My project for Khoj Peers borrows largely from medical illustrations of the 18th Century, as well as those that came later, particularly those that illustrate the different aspects of optometry. These drawings come together in the form of a rather large atlas (tentatively titled The Atlas of Optometry) that is composed of numerous pages, pockets and sections. While the atlas seems to explore and literally open up to ideas related to the act of seeing, and the anatomical structure and functioning of eye itself, these components merely act as a device to imply larger and more complex ideas. The illustrations and optometric terms included in the work are intended to insinuate ideas or situations in
context to projection and perception of socio-political ideas and beliefs, political structures and their functioning in India. Among the other ideas that are also explored in the pages of the atlas are those of scrutiny and censorship, to which I have drawn parallels from the act of prying and that of obstructing sight/ vision. These two ideas, perhaps, arise from my own discomfort with the possible unauthorized and unlimited access, and the prying into my personal data by third parties and its possible misuse; at the same time by a similar discomfort caused bythe filtering of data that we’re prevented from seeing/accessing/consuming.
The tale of optometry and the quest for a room of her own Oxymoron The investigation for Faiza Hasan started with the absurd feeling of being watched by the surveillance cameras installed at the Khoj courtyard. This idea altered itself along way from the several directions, wherein she could survey the oxymoronic identity of surveillance and censorship. Here what she came with met what she saw, and the visual atlas of optometry captured the gaze in its various identities. The correlations made are explorations with the idea of the eye as a device of vision (both the real eye and the artificial/mechanical vision and generated perception) and its functioning in the idea of personal, collective, governmental and security based surveillances. Her work at Khoj borrows from eighteenth-century scientific and medical illustrations using them as points of reference and associations to the accelerated technological vision that is both tangible and intangible (like video footage from Surveillance cameras against data snooping on the Internet). The identity of the watcher in juxtaposition to the one being watched exercises a sense of authorial and power based advantage for the watcher behind the screen as opposed to the one on it. The thoughts that
surveillance and censorship instigate range from consciousness to discomfort, fear to awkwardness, prevention to avoidance. The illustrations take these scientific names and are numbered like they were out of an optometrist’s academic journal and is composed of numerous pages, pockets and sections, addressing insecurities and anomalies in its connected premise. Data also becomes a visual intervention as Google search words from the month of May 2015 on terms related to Surveillance and censorship get carved on to the atlas. The internet too is explored as a space of monitoring, of putting people under a check, their information, personal and otherwise because they chose to look for data or information that makes them a prospective hazard – a threat. Among other ideas that are also explored in the pages of the atlas are those of scrutiny and censorship which arise from Hasan’s own discomfort with the possible unauthorized, unlimited access and prying into personal data by third parties and its possible misuse. At the same time there is a similar discomfort with the filtering of data that comes to us, that we’re prevented from seeing/accessing/consuming decided by an order that we may not believe in at all.
Mithun Das
Mithun completed his BFA from the Indian College of Arts & Draftsmanship, Kolkata in 2011 followed by an MFA from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan in 2014. His group shows include 75th and 77th Annual Exhibition Academy Of Fine Arts, Kolkata, Kolkata (2013); ICCR Gallery, Kolkata, Birla Academy Art & Culture, Kolkata; Hutheesing Visual Art Center, Ahmedabad, AIAF (2013), the 46th and 47th Annual Exhibition Birla Academy Art & Culture, Kolkata; Annual Exhibition Kala Bhavana, ICCR Gallery, Kolkata . He has performed at the 2013 Kolkata International Performance Art Festival. His work is in the collections -Kitchenar House, Eastern Commend, Kolkata, Fort William, Eastern Commend, Kolkata, Bodhi Tree Monastery of Art, Kolkata and the Birla Academy Art & Culture, Kolkata.
It’s a phantasmagorical world where I seek my solace. My works celebrate the uncanny. The motifs which constantly recur in my imagery speak of desires as well as of unknown fears, which continues to haunt me. I constantly jostle with myself in order to express my emotions through numerous marks on the surface. These marks not only decipher the tale of pleasure and pain but also hint at dreams and nightmares. Death is probably the harshest reality of life. I have access to a public hospital in Kolkata, where death, mutilations, morbid infections and grotesque afflictions of the human body are everyday reality. Such stomach churning, heart rending experiences often lie dormant in mind till they find forms. Signs of automatism are very strong in my works
as one image leads to another and join up. My figures, neither dead nor alive, constantly evolve from one form to the other, much like an unidentified metamorphosing creature. There is a subconscious urge to negate all set norms of beauty when I draw with my anxious graphic lines. Mutilated bodies and carcasses float around the surface. Many of them have strong erotic overtones. Sensuality is an integral part of my images. Oozing fluids from open wounds or transformed male phallus/female genitals teases our perception. The primitive urge finds mention. I further exaggerate certain visual sensations by introducing several paraphernalia with the figures. My narratives revolve around the private spaces where I do question and contest my own existence.
The Legends From the Badlands Of Bengal. Lore There is an eerie feeling that encapsulates the working space of Mithun Das. The sensibility of his studio alters itself as one moves from fragment to fragment, finding a metaphor to the district of Mograhat (in West Bengal), the village Das hails from and grew up in. What defines the grotesque and the gory renditions of Das’ work are the realities of this region, marked by the ‘bloody’, the barbaric. The area is a badland in its conventions and otherwise, housing violence like it was staple. Das in his work borrows heavily from this premise and its tolerance to create a Lord of his Flies for himself, recording a firsthand witness account of what he grew up around, just like Golding’s account of barbarism. The demon here is graphic and the figurations distorted; the phantasmagorical forms the narrative to his tales from the lore. The sections of his work uphold the morbid, the morose in its conjunctions. The space unfolds like a house of horrors. The first installation in the room sparks of notions of claustrophobia, as one pulls the door behind to shut oneself in a space slightly larger than a coffin. It feels like a coffin till the ultraviolet lights come on bringing to life an illuminated rendition, invoking phantom thoughts underlining the excesses of Mograhat. The uncanny continues in the larger drawings
on the walls, occasionally lessening the stark black lines and details with sheets of drawings; charcoal marking the frustrations, anxieties, fear, uncertainty and a horror that constantly reappropriates itself in the mind of Mithun, more like an eyewitness to the anomalies of an everyday life he grew up in. The various containers preserving several parts of a certain anatomy correlate to the human self and how these disturbing objects are now okay to his vision. This accelerates with the central wall – scratched out, hurt, traumatized. It furthers this installation as frustrations mount and figurations swell, the very act of scratching evolving as an act of violence, repression to an outburst. The scratching continues on the body that witnesses, leaving marks that are often not visible. There is a disturbing symmetry to the close shots of the body (Mithun’) accentuating the scars, the hair and the pores making an unruly visual, a canvas. Figures that look episodic are hauntingly placed on a field of skin, making the body a journal of trauma recording the incidents that are sensorial. The figures play like apparitions out of a nightmare that hold the body together, firm and adapted, okay with terror, horror and trauma on the outer, but susceptible to its fears on the inside.
Shailesh BR
Shailesh works with drawings, sculptures, installations and machinery, exploring the premise between mythology and contemporaneity. He holds the Gold Medal from CAVA Mysuru and has pursued his Masters Diploma from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda where he was conferred with the Nasreen Mohamedi Best Display Award for the year 2015. His work has been displayed at several exhibitions including Gallery Espace, New Delhi (2014) and CIMA Kolkata (2014). He was a part of the PEERS Share programme in the year 2013 at KHOJ International Artists Association, New Delhi. He is the recipient of the Inlaks Fine Arts Award 2015 and was a finalist for the CIMA Emerging Artist Award.
Shailesh’s work at Khoj, deals with the idea the frequent tremors experienced by Delhi – the earthquake is something he has only heard of. The consolidation in terms of iron support and the dense structurality of Khirkee find a correlation for him in the myth of Vishnu’s Varaha Avatar, where he takes the form of a boar to rescue Bhudevi (Earth) from the demon Hiranyaksha who stole the Earth and hid her in the primordial waters. Varaha slew the demon and retrieved the Earth from the ocean, lifting it on his tusks, and restored Bhudevi to her place in the universe. He imagines the myth as one filled with a tremor that signifies protection and safety.
He imagines the turbulence as the lifting of the earth by the Varaha Avatar on his tusks, reappropriating the very idea of an earthquake and its daunting implications.
The tale of the mythologist Myth There is a distinct growl that overpowers the studio of artist Shailesh BR. Standing around it, one could think of all the possibilities of what the space could be from within – a carpenter’s workshop, a mechanical unit, an industrial unit or a construction site – the space in fact is all of this and so is his artistic practice. The distinct growl is a chorus of the two machines that are prototypes of what he intends to explore as a possibility. The well-spaced display gives out little of the conditions the works were created in – a scatter of mechanical and carpentry tools, wires and papers, toys. Shailesh often admits his lack of knowledge about “urban” objects (Shailesh hails from a remote village in Karnataka where electricity isn’t available yet), the english language and grammar. But he is confident of what he knows – a fourteen-year background in Sanskrit and mythological studies. He seemingly draws “like a child”, writes with little regard for the English language, but expresses his thoughts and their translation to a mechanical object in these works, which play out like blueprints – blueprints to his machine. The past few years since art School, he has been introduced to a series of alien objects right from a fork to the idea of an earthquake. This earthquake forms the hypothesis for his work at Khoj, in the
density of Khirkee and the earthquake prone city of Delhi. The earthquake he talks of is imagined (Shailesh has never experienced an earthquake in his life) from the various accounts of his friends, the media and the questions that arose in his mind looking at the iron bars that support the Khoj building. The drawings on the wall show various ideas of how he perceives the earthquake, of which the myth of Vishnu’s Varaha Avatar finding prominence. The pig in Shailesh’s work becomes symbolic of the protection of the earth as he connects them to various ideas, for instance - A piggy bank that harbours the idea of safety for a child’s coins, or in a set of drawings in a format that he identifies as a graphic novel form but look more like text book illustrations. The earthquake and its relative terms find a joyfulness in his toy-like sculptures. The abacus with irregular bars playfully makes the shifting of the tectonic plates a game of globe shifting, lightly bringing in the idea of the Anthropocene. Another sculpture holds a glass on its edge as it violently vibrates, creating constant ripples and a hum in the room. The viewer is invited to place his hands on the box and feel the created earthquake. The body of work produced at Khoj is an investigation of the unknown and his several drawings testify the ideas have been explored and discovered along the way.
Utsa Hazarika
Utsa Hazarika completed her MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and her undergraduate degree in Philosophy from the London School of Economics. Her interests are in art, resistance studies and indigenous rights.
At Khoj, Utsa is working on introducing materials and objects into her video practice, and investigating the ways of storytelling with the moving image. Playing with reflective surfaces allows her to work with new possibilities of the kinds of ‘screens’ onto which video is projected, and to look towards creating video installations with sculptural and architectural references. She is also looking at introducing the symbolism and associations of manufactured objects into the work, with earthen matkas and disco balls.
The tale of the moving image Blank Verse A few seconds into viewing the frames of Utsa Hazarika’ work one is introduced to her sound pieces; sonically accentuated fragments of sounds collected by her camera from the surroundings or by participating elements of her shoot, reworked to form a score for her work. This forms one of the most interesting experiences in her video technique that uses a jigsaw of fragmented sequences, forming the constant murmur. Hazarika is unapologetic and uninhibited in terms of choice, collation and comprehension; may be it comes from not having studied in a Fine Arts program or maybe it just comes from the clarity she exhibits in her sharp visual edits and sonic techniques; either way it contributes generously to the perceptive reading of her work. As part of her project at Khoj, Utsa Hazarika attempts to introduce materials and objects into her video practice, investigating the ways of storytelling they create together with the moving image. Would that be called an installation or a video sculpture or a video projection, is something she consciously avoids defining. She introduces a ‘space with an object’ that is meant to be experienced – visually, sonically and its components forming the narrative. In the course of her residency, Hazarika has been playing with different reflective surfaces that allow her to work with new possibilities
in terms of the kinds of ‘screens’ that can accommodate projections, the possibilities of it thereby as a media of communication. By using found and manufactured objects, Hazarika is exploring the symbolism and associations that come with incorporating manufactured objects into her work. In Peers, she has experimented with a range of objects, including earthen matkas and disco balls. She also continues to work with sound, and brings together these various elements- video, sound, found objects and reflective surfaces into her work Mirage. It may be an effort to put the visuals together like a puzzle, visuals that are all the same, just differentiated in the uncontrolled and chance projection on the part of the reflective surface. Formatively and ideologically, Hazarika chooses to keep predictability away. She understands her footage as stoical and potent, creating a narrative that is complex. She eliminates the conventional tropes by making little of the recorded words, dissecting her footage and constantly repurposing her own ideas along the way. Recurrence is a tool with which with she creates convolution. There is little indication for as to what her camera is looking for and she uses it as a weave to her work. She deconstructs impermanence as she tests the term against the lost, that which has passed, the vacuum or the absent.
open day
2015