Look and Listen

After our second weekly meeting at Khoj today, I have come to the conclusion that there are two different things going on in this residency:

1) The artists are interacting/communicating with each other – which is to be expected.
2) The artworks are interacting/communicating with each other – which is perhaps a little unexpected...
(More on how Khoj is turning into its very own unique eco-habitat later!)

While much of this is happening unintentionally, for Navin Thomas his primary focus is to make his artworks “speak.”  He explains it to us so:

“I wanted to work with materials closest to me - radio and ecology; it’s not sculpture, it’s not ‘print on canvas,’ it’s not ‘pure object.’  I want to ask: what happens beyond the system of objects?  I try to push that dialogue further.  Seeing as I come from an acoustic background, I pursue the idea of how to make the objects speak.”

And so that brings us to Navin’s first work-in-progress for this residency consisting of steel urinals, which will hopefully emit sub-sonic frequencies recorded at the Yamuna River.  Except there is one problem – not much seems to move in the thick sludge of the Yamuna.

This sacred river is so polluted by our sewage and waste products that when Navin held a ‘hydrophone’ (an instrument used to sense life-forms) into it he was unable to detect any signs of life – except one, some kind of cat-fish, with red-bulging eyes.

Which brings us to his next work, part of a series called “Meet the neighbours” where he will be displaying these supposedly mutated fish in large water-tanks.  He is curious to study its possible mutations but he’s also just curious to see what kind of creature is capable of sustaining itself in such conditions.

And that’s the main makhzat (purpose) of Navin’s works: to observe.  He isn’t particularly interested in highly technological media as he doesn’t want the audience to be distracted by spectacle – he just wants us to observe and for the various structures and animals in his artworks to speak...mostly to each other.

“Ode to Dengue” is also going to be in a similar vain – an architectural structure that will record the effects of lunar and U.V. light on the local bat colony and insects.  This not only looks at the influence of urban architecture on ecology, but asks the question of “how defunct structures can sustain all kinds of ecology.”

When I ask about what inspires Navin, he tells me “I’m not influenced by artists – I go to the flea-market for inspiration.  I think you can tell a lot about a culture by what it throws away.  I observe objects, I try to understand them by bringing them home and making them speak.”