light tank

Made from photographs shot during the trial at the studio.

video from the exhibition Guaranteed to Work 2

video link

pundole and guild april 2009

These objects are guaranteed to work. In a future world, new life forms evolve assembled out of the debris of civilization. These fragments are assembled together to make war machines that create a spectacle out of comic juxtapositions and movements; a computing machine bleeds its wires all over the floor as it generates answers; a city is made out of what used to be parts of its most base infrastructure and a garden is created that is both absurd and beautiful. Tiny fragments enlarge to become part of a larger whole through a shift of scale and vice versa. We recognize the pieces that make these machines only for a moment before the stability of signifier disappears into the assemblage.How long will these machines last or how long should they? Once their life is over do these also disappear into what remains of our history- waiting for another purpose, another meaning- an afterlife?

Edge of Nations (at Pundole)A miniature tank assembled out of a car jack, cycle wheels, etc rumbles across the floor. You can control its movement up to a point until a parallel set of controls begins to take over.

The Computing Machine (at Pundole)This machine can answer all the questions of the universe- except that all answers are randomly generated through a circuitry of movements and noises. The only answers possible are ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘cancel’.

The Garden (at Pundole)This is a garden made from the fragments of our everyday lives. In it is a longing for elsewhere. The other place is desire.

Infrared cannot be seen by naked eye (at The Guild)We walk into this city and join a lost car as it tries to navigate a maze like city of high rises and surveillance. A roving eye, a helicopter, a clock, a light house watches over us.

Light Tank (at The Guild)As a turntable makes its perpetual turns a tank spews out light in spectacular patterns that fill the room.

Rohan Shivkumar

installation view at Pundole

At Guild



Infrared Cannot Be Seen By Naked Eyes :It is the same work that I put up at Anant, Delhi. The installation changed a lot. Not only the space was different but too because many architect friends worked to put it up. Rohan Shivkumar, Rupali Gupte, Sonal Sundarajan (my colleagues) students from our college, Jinal Shah, Aparna Parekh, Maitri shah, Kunal Bhatia, Richa Mehta, Amya Gurkar and Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, artist. The show would not have happened without their help. This one was completely Rohan, Sonal, Jinal and Rupali’s display.

Light Tank: Ranjit sat and opened up around one hundred connections and soldered them. This was displayed once before at "Re-visioning Materiality", 19th December 2007 Gallery Espace, New Delhi.

Photographs: Prakash Rao

Girish Shahane wrote about the show at

http://girishshahane.blogspot.com/2009/04/kausik-and-kiran.html

Light Tank

Light Tank 48" x 26" x 30"

Rope lights, wood, motors and lots of electrical relays

The device with a spout has these strings of light coming out of it. It has a rather complicated mechanical circuit attached to it and comes on when a switch is pressed by the spectator. All the lights do not come on at the same time but works in a pattern controlled by the circuit.

"Re-visioning Materiality", 19th December 2007 Gallery Espace, New Delhi

Nancy wrote beautifully about the work :

Artworks seem to have an inflated ego today, big enough to burst, glossy enough to fall into place in an interior designer’s manual. And of course, they unfailingly make a specious nod to international politics or national crisis. Hoping, presumably, that the grimness of the political catastrophe will make up for their lack of imagination and integrity. As more and more packaged and branded art circulates with assembly-line precision, imagine works that are differently abled. That blink nervously and pull your leg even as they themselves limp into action. Artworks that are guided as much by the DIY ethic of the hackers and the thrifty innovations of the scavengers who service the recycling economy; that solemnly adopt poor materials only to take the piss out of them Dadaist style. Mukhopadhyay’s extended sculptures are marked by a deviant materiality sourced from the rejects of high art.

In this show, Mukhopadhyay who is in the habit of overturning all seats of power (recall his split and splintered chair thrones, 2000), topples a stool and places the rudiments of a tank on it. A nest of wires lie tangled between its legs while a bare wooden dome unleashes a gun fashioned from a handy piece of PVC pipe. Rope lights anticipating a festival swirl around the stool and stream out of the PVC spout. A switch activates the complicated and rather precarious circuitry put together by the artist. When the tank is ‘fired’ light gallops through the serpentine tubes and rebounds. Mukhopadhyay paradoxically invests light with the properties of darkness, a light that carries the threat of a graveyard but projects the look of a luminous Diwali or Durga Puja.

This phallic toy is a comment on the devastating military games played by cretinous little men. Imagine Bush rocking on a hobby horse, hurling ‘smart’ bombs at unsuspecting villagers in Afghanistan. The artist shoots his absurdist fantasies at us, at the speed of light. But wait for the quintessential Mukhopadhyay breakdown, communication is not as simple as switching on a light. Especially so, in this world of negative vibrations where an artist has to make a strong effort to transmit his energies to a viewer.

Nancy Adajania