Art: Cries off the wall

Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya test the limits of the moving image. They reinvent the role it plays in recording social histories. They are the Desire Machine Collective based in Guwahati, Assam, and the centrepiece of Noise Life, their first solo show in Mumbai, mines the various complexities of image construction besides telling a dark story about mental illness. In the 32-minute video projected on a wall, mental illness is personal torment as well as metaphor for an oppressed society and a decaying geography.

The storytelling is ostensibly non-linear. A background score of political speeches, personal accounts of people suffering from mental illness and clanging industrial noise accompany visuals like mundane scenes from desolate, dark corridors of what looks like a run-down hospital, sweeping shots of a river and its bank, a bird’s-eye view of a barren topography, close-ups of a human face and its angsty Expressionist swirl. Even in the diminutive video format, it is Tarkovskian in style, except that Jain, 37, and Madhukaillya, 36, certainly don’t intend it to be pure fiction.

Their work, since the formation of the collective in 2004, has blurred the lines between the personal and the political. Their media/video works depend heavily on researching, recording and archiving sounds and visuals which, to them, reveal the urgent issues of the environment and society they are documenting—largely the North-East. Their earlier works are directly about political identity, the sanctity of forests, the excesses of capitalism and the implications of a nation state that exists on the margins of a larger world order.

Residue (2011), a film projection which features an abandoned thermal power plant in Guwahati, illuminates the beauty of the ruin and its existence as a memory of a period of heavy industrialization. Trespassers Will (Not) Be Prosecuted (2008), their most travelled work, is a result of recording, over four years, the sounds deep inside Mawphlang, a forest considered sacred in Meghalaya. Daily Check Up (2005) looks at the everyday violence “experienced in a region of imposed geographies, and pushed into the periphery of a nation’s imagination”. The recurrent motif of this video is a visual shot of a security check at the airport. In Alfa Beta (2005), they question the representation of the North-East in mainstream media. Textual puns punctuate footage of the Hindi film Tango Charlie to deconstruct the stereotypical representation of people from the North-East.

Other works in Noise Life include recordings of political speeches and speeches of protest in the North-East, installed inside a large cement wall. When the sounds emanate from inside, they are muffled but with the force of an oppressed but unputdownable aggregate of voices. At the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan’s gallery, a single image from the video is multiplied hundreds of times for different frames in a photographic installation.

In a narrow sense, the Desire Machine Collective is similar to the art collectives of the 1960s, which were formed as a response to the tensions of the sociopolitical trends of the decade, like the Guerrilla Girls in the US and Reclaim The Streets (RTS) in the UK and the Yellow House Collective in Australia. But the collective is not meant as protest. “I think we are in the contemporary art world by accident. We are process-driven and outside regulated establishments like the studio,” Madhukaillya says. Guwahati does not have an art market, art galleries or state-run art establishments, so the location was deliberate. Much of their recorded material does not often take the form of a work of art or a thesis.

In 2007, they acquired permission to use an abandoned ferry on the shores of the Brahmaputra river to make and install art. They have invited artists from all over the world to work on the ferry, which they have called Periferry, and live there if they want to. “You can call it a laboratory. The emphasis is not on a final product but with the process of interacting with the environment. And we don’t invite new artists every year, Periferry is more about sustained interaction, so we have some artists who have been coming here for a few years,” Madhukaillya says.

Jain and Madhukaillya chose to go this local after they finished their education in applied art and film-making, respectively, at Ahmedabad’s National Institute of Design (NID). The Gujarat riots of 2002 shook them up and made them aware of the overwhelming sense of insecurity everywhere. “It was not that the North-East was disturbed. It was an epiphany for us,” Madhukaillya says.

He is from Jorhat, Assam, and was studying astrophysics before he became a film-maker. Jain is from Shillong, Meghalaya. Their practice, clearly defying established artistic or intellectual genres, proves how the local can be so convincingly global. About a decade ago, they returned from Gujarat to the North-East and made it the seat of their politics—the decision has taken them to forests, streets, ships and hospitals. They have travelled with their works to Venice, Tokyo, New York, Berlin and other cities before coming to Mumbai with this show.

Noise Life is on show from 11am-7pm till 22 September (Sundays closed), at Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, K Dubash Marg, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai; and till 18 October (Sundays and Mondays closed), at Project 88, BMP Building, NA Sawant Marg, Colaba, Mumbai.