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The Arts Catalyst and P3 invite you to
THE NEIGHBOUR
Ashok Sukumaran
The neighbour, neither friend nor enemy, is the one who may not be in your "network", but is nevertheless in your world. (Sukumaran)
An Arts Catalyst commission
Press View 4pm
Private view 6pm
Thursday 12 March 2009
P3, University of Westminster
35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS, UK
Exhibition open 13 March - 9 April 2009
Entrance via red gate opposite Baker Street tube
Admission free
Bombay-based Ashok Sukumaran is one of the few artists in the world making work that directly addresses issues of infrastructure: the ideological and human landscape that surrounds material and informational transports such as water, electricity, and trade. Beyond the logic of access through infrastructure, his work engages with questions of proximity, hierarchy, directionality and doubt amidst the "networks". This March, The Arts Catalyst and P3 present Sukumaran's new installation The Neighbour in P3, in what used to be a giant concrete-testing hall, deep under the University of Westminster in central London.
This ambitious project is Sukumaran's first major one-person exhibition in the UK. In The Neighbour, two ostensibly "mobile" habitats share space. One is a "static" mobile home from the late 1970's, which developed as a way for lower-middle class families to partake in "caravan culture", and escape from the city and its property regimes. The other, coming in from another direction, is a camper van, which in the same historical period tried to imagine the continuously nomadic home, built in the car factory.
These two objects, from the inside and out, allow us to inhabit contemporary questions around the "housing industry", its overlapping landscapes of desire, and the psychic spaces of enclosure and spacing that have evolved not just among people, but also among competing machines, and their regulatory frameworks.
Sukumaran: "These are maybe second cousins, somewhere between the family and the polis. We are neighbours as a result of our mutual migration, from more traditional forms of modernity. This is then an allegory of neighbourhood, caused by our inability to escape each other."
Psychological analyses of the neighbour (from Freud to Zizek) suggest the "logical tragedy" between a love of freedom, and love of the neighbour. The landscape darkens, and curiosity, obsession and suspicion appear as deep forces that overflow the ideology of tolerance, or "safe distance". The neighbour remains largely unknowable, opaque.
Sukumaran: "Lurkers, pests, potential collaborators, potential spies, potential contaminants seems to appear often in our recent work. Their threat or presence shapes relations, and gives rise to the leaks, negotiations and traversals that we are interested in, those that test the network paradigm."
Ashok Sukumaran (b.1974) came to international prominence with the extraordinary work Glow Positioning System, 2005: a public lighting installation that involved collaborations with street decorators, shop owners and local residents to allow a hand-turned crank to move a giant panorama of lights, traversing a city square in Bombay. His recent work is commissioned and exhibited internationally. In 2008, he co-founded CAMP, a space for critical artistic research and archiving projects.
Sukumaran was awarded the first prize of the 2005 UNESCO Digital Arts Award, and received a Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica, 2007. He recently showed (with Shaina Anand) the video ensemble "Lossfulness" in the Indian Highway exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London and is currently developing (with CAMP) a two-part work on the sea trade to Somalia, for the Sharjah Biennale, 2008.
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The Arts Catalyst
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The Arts Catalyst commissions art that experimentally and critically engages with science. We bring together people across the art/science divide and beyond to explore science in its wider social, political and cultural contexts. We produce provocative, playful, risk-taking projects to spark dynamic conversations about our changing world.
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