Tilting

an Art History Workshop by Akansha Rastogi, curator at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, conducted at SEA during 9-13 July 2018.

Ashwin Gupta,

While defining ‘Tilting’ the exhibition curated by Akansha Rastogi studies and explores the idea of a collaborative form and art. She starts with introducing different studies on collaborations, and how their interactions speak about the society, like the research slime mould, by Evelyn Fox Keller, which speaks about how single cell organism come together in harsh environments to function as an organ, reducing its consumption of the limited resources around, and surviving, without a parent cell stimulating this process. But this idea wasn’t accepted for a long time by the scientific community couldn’t conceive the idea absence of a superior cell initiating the other cells. This and many other readings on experiments and art, where collaborative works questions the idea of the mediator and intermediate, speak about how changing the parameters of audience becoming a part of the act, like in Marina abramovic’s  work, or changing the idea of a stage by making it independent of the audience in a roof act, Akansha brought all these individual works together, and linking them led to readings on collaborative pieces itself.

Akansha then went ahead create groups, and distributed experiments in art, where the audience weren’t just consumers, but a part of the act and their movements and reactions became the performance. The multiple readings derived from these works, became the base concept which were then processed to create ‘Tilting’.

The audience in first piece creates a trail which continues to add up into a narrative by analysis of the existing narrative. It also included rearrangement of blocks and titling it, which too builds a palette for things that people perceived by their permutations and combinations using the same modules.

The second act was a feedback of loop which recorded and superimposed sound produced in the studios and the sounds of its immediate context, which is suppressed by it, creating layers. Two different speakers play the sound of the studio and its context. The sounds produced by the audience are also recorded and overlaid into the existing recording. The conversation between the two speakers update on being intruded.

The third apparatus introduces dynamic spaces, by creating a mesh of threads pinned to a single point on one end and multiple points on the other, which is changed by the audience while they position it according to their heights. A new unit of sausages was introduced to measure human height and finally also creating a network of threads by creating nodes, with a parameter of height.

The fourth performance created an action reaction loop where an act was initiated as a stimulus, and the reaction of the audience to this stimulus, became the stimulus itself, which then continues to feed itself.

The fifth installation was based on sudden encounters of objects places all over the space, which does not have an introduction to the objects, but it just becomes as a sudden discovery.